Seeking Advice - How to Handle This Situation?

[kayla-na.livejournal.com]

Ok so...Last year in November, a friend of mine saw that I really wanted an adoptable that went up for auction but it was out of my reach. My friend ended up autobuying the auction, and gave me the adoptable as an early Xmas gift. The premise of the auction is that once the design is bought, it belongs to the buyer 100%. So since my friend bought the adoptable and gave it to me, he relinquished ownership to me.

Fast forward to today, I end up finding the adoptable recolored and raffled off. Confused, because the design was supposed to be relinquished upon purchase. So I asked the person about it, their gf won the raffle and gave it to the person that I found the recolored adoptable from. We talk back and forth, and upon doing some digging through what they presented me, said artist sold the original adoptable to my friend for a lot of money....but two weeks after that, they resold it to the person that my friend beat to get the adoptable in the first place.

Then, said person that lost raffled the recolored adoptable to the gf, and said gf gave it to the person that I spoke to.

At this point I'm pretty peeved because the design was unique, and there were NO recolors presented at the time of the auction. I'm wondering how my friend and I should proceed with this...

Comments

[celestinaketzia.livejournal.com]

That doesn't particularly stipulate that the lineart won't be reused. I suggest contacting the artist to voice your concerns. However if they never stipulated they'd never reuse the lineart again it may be just a case of not going back to them.

[kayla-na.livejournal.com]

We did, just waiting a response right now. Just kind of worried what to do after this point.

[celestinaketzia.livejournal.com]

Let us know how it goes! I'm definitely curious to see how the artist responds to you.

[kayla-na.livejournal.com]

Well supposedly the person that bought the look-alike was supposed to use the artist's art as a temporary reference, but they never changed the character's lineart design while it was in use and when they raffled it off.

My friend and I are just going to chalk it up as an experience, and to make sure we get everything in writing in the future. The timing of the whole thing was just really suspicious, but not much we can do at this point.

[celestinaketzia.livejournal.com]

We did a little digging, and it definitely is suspicious as all get out. Given the artist tends to recolor their lines quite often this one wasn't uploaded, and not used in a batch like their other batch linearts.

It's really unfortunate, and imo shady. I wonder if this is the only one to ever get this kind of treatment, because it was obvious this one was meant to be a one-off like all of their other one-off designs.