To band members, artists and record producers:

English: (Español arriba)

This blog is our portal to publicise products that we make such as patches, badges and zines that may have images or textzçs made by you or someone you know. While we realise that this means that we are using someone else´s artwork we see it as appropriate to do so for the following reasons. One is that we are against the enforcement of creative property rights. Afterall artists throughout history made art for various reasons and they existed before art could be “owned” and “sold”. This probably means that most of the time no-one, not even the artist, had conceived the idea of restricting the use and re-appropriation of their creations. Say for example cave paitings, prehistoric statuettes or body painting.
Secondly we do not consider that we are making a business out of counter-cultures. Our purpose is to promote punk, anarchism and DIY cultures and not make a profit. We do this by keeping production costs low and selling cheaply. In the first instance, we don´t think that ideas, art, music, etc. should be turned into property at all as this necessarily means it will become an exchangable commodity. Obviously we DO ask for and end up receiving money for our products but this is merely a small return to pay for materials. Since we started making these things we haven´t sold much and haven´t even come close to recovering the money we´ve invested in materials and tools. But we don´t care, we don´t want to sell lots, mostly we enjoy the creative process and learning new things. If at some point we were able to make any money at all it would be a bonus, even a small amount that we could use to start buy basics or beer or whatever, but it´s not our objective, (we rely on other shitty, temporary jobs and and other tricks and the such for our economic needs). If we had ways of getting materials for free and didn´t have to work elsewhere to survive plus lots of spare time then we wouldn´t ask for any money at all. And on ocassions we have been able to so this for loved-ones - to make things to give as gifts. It would be great to be able to this all the time to lots of people but our economic situation doesn´t allow for this, as is the case for most people.
For the same reasons we don´t think that we “exploit” artists by using their art without consent to make money, or “capitalising” on others efforts. This would be the case if we were making large quantities of bootleg t-shirts of some popular crust band and selling them on the net for $US 10 to kids from rich countries. That would definitely be fucked up for so many reasons. That´s why we try to offer things at the lowest cost possible or swap stuff so that our things are accessible to everyone who is interested. Also we think that the absence of advertising material to encourage people to buy further demonstrates that we don´t wish to rip anyone off. Really, we mostly want to help the growth of the culture and ideas that we love and do things that we love like silk-screen printing and making zines.
So, if you are a band member or artist that has made images that we have used, you have every right to ask to stop using them, but please consider the above opinions and also, consider informing yourself about the negative implications of creative or intellectual property rights.