On February 1, 2012 Trestle Press Publishing, an independent publishing company run by Giovanni Gelati, imploded under allegations of art theft and copyright infringement.
L. Vera, former author with Trestle Press, publicly accused Gelati on his deviantART blog and Twitter account of breaking copyright infringement law, as well as illegally downloading and using artwork without artist permission for the covers of his novels. Within a few hours, the accusations went viral. Trestle Press authors around the globe began posting statements on their Twitter feeds and blogs regarding the accusations, most of them in support of Vera. Take a look here, here, here, here, here, more over here, and here, here, there, and there.
Vera used his blog and twitter account to contact as many affected authors as he could, and followed up his accusations by posting example after example of a Trestle Press cover, matched with an artist or another existing publication where the artwork had been illegally stolen.
Not only has Gelati been accused of stealing artwork from small, independent artists on the Deviantart website, he has also been accused of using such licensed images as the Fearnet.com icon, a photograph of Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter from MGM’s Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure movie, several iconic images from video games including IO Interactive’s Hitman series, the burning skeleton face from Sony Picture’s Ghost Rider movie, and, bizarrely, an image lifted from a novel by the famous Stephen King.
As the incident unfolded throughout the day, various Trestle Press Authors began issuing statements on their blogs and on social media sites stating that they had severed ties with the company and had removed their books from distribution.
Accused owner of Trestle Press Publishing, Giovanni Gelati, posted a declaration on his website on February 2nd that he may have “naively” used some images which did not belong to him or for which he did not not have permission. Within the same statement, Gelati stated that he had made numerous attempts to contact several artists, but because none of them ever got back to him, he used their images anyway. The statement has since been deleted from the Trestle Press website; see here for the cached version.
As of this writing, Trestle Press continues to be a working publishing company despite the allegations and controversy.
It is to be noted that I have been personally effected by this situation - my serialized digital novel Mina’s Daughter…The Harker Chronicles was published by Trestle Press, was one of the original novels to be red flagged by L. Vera as having stolen cover art.
At my request, the novel was removed from the publishing company’s catalog of books, and I have formally left the company as a writer. A formal statement has been made on my blog regarding the situation.
In addition, I was able to locate the owner of the beautiful artwork which had been used without artist permission or payment by Giovanni Gelati for my book cover. The artist is Liliana Sanches from Portugal, and here is her deviantART webpage. Ms. Sanches has been incredibly gracious about the whole situation, and recognizes that it was Trestle Press and not myself who used her artwork without her knowledge. I have apologized for any inconvenience. In addition, we have worked out a deal where I will pay her for the artwork, thus bringing to an end my part in this difficult situation.
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