The unofficial Sonic fact book “We Love Sonic!” is now being investiged by Carlton Publishing Group after fans noticed material was heavily plagiarized from fan art and fansites.
Following up on our story regarding the unofficial book, Carlton Books has responded to Dave Luty’s request for comment on Twitter, stating that they will be investigating the situation with the third party creating the book.
Hi @DaveLuty, thanks for bringing this to our attention. We are now handling matters with the third-party who created this book. You can see our full response here: https://t.co/m9b1jCXpEH
— Welbeck Publishing Group (@welbeckpublish) June 21, 2019
Their full response is on the book’s main page, and states that the images seen are not representative of the final product:
Carlton works with a variety of third-party writers and contributors. We will be looking very closely into any issues relating to their submitted work. Images that were initially uploaded online mistakenly, were work-in-progress only, and not fully representative of the final product. These images have now been removed.
Whether or not the intentions of the creators of the fact book were innocent, it’s still not a very good sign that they used artwork and content from fans as placeholders. That said, it’s sort of a testament to the quality of content that fans have been putting out in recent years; some 3D models are so great that many publishers and websites have used them without realizing they weren’t official, and even Nintendo has accidentally used a fan’s recreation of the Sonic Forces logo by mistake.
That said, it’s one thing to make a mistake, but entirely another thing to copy and paste something from a Wiki site, regardless of how factual or well-written it is. We will keep a sharp eye out for more updates on this book as we see them.