Update on Winner of Challenge #22 - Cook it up.

An extremely unfortunate and disheartening incident has been brought to our notice, hence this post. It breaks our heart to say this, but it needs to be spelled out. We are appalled by the fact that one of our challenge participants has used someone else's layout and passed it off as her own. Had we known about this, under no circumstances would we have selected the entry as the winner. We thank the crafter who brought this up and routed us to the original blog post made in 2010.

Stealing someone's image(s) is immoral and unethical. When a crafter enters a project to our challenges, we trust that it is made by them and do not doubt their abilities and creativity. We believe that as a community of passionate crafters, we are absolutely capable of creating something on our own.

Also, as there are a lot of crafters who do not blog at all, when we see a new entry with a new blog with just that one post, we do not automatically doubt the ownership of the images. And when we were scanning the entries, we loved the brilliant work amongst all and decided to reward the participant as the winner.

We are in the process of addressing this with the participant and simultaneously exploring avenues to ensure such incidents do not happen in the near future. You can expect an update from us in this regard in the near future.

As a word of caution, we would also like to advise our participants that there is a strong possibility that our projects / images can be stolen and passed off as someone else's. So one of the steps one can take is watermark the images at prominent locations which cannot be cropped or makes it difficult for an individual to reproduce as their own. It is difficult to control to actions or desire of an individual to copy someone’s work, but we can safeguard our own work, should it ever land in the wrong hands.

Please be assured that we are working on addressing this issue and will do the needful. Look forward to your cooperation.

Thank you,

Team Lulupu.