Hi Everyone – John here from skinnyCorp. I would like to thank everyone in the community for their patience, I have been trying to get a blog post up about the resolution we reached with Anke Weckmann and Melanie Hudson, and unfortunately it has taken this long.

After the initial blog posts debating the originality of Melanie Hudson’s design and the similarities to Anke Weckmann's work, we deemed it necessary to investigate the matter further and to gather as many facts as we could from the parties involved. From that point, we reviewed all of the relevant information both internally with our production staff as well as with our external legal counsel, and came to the determination that a significant portion of Ms. Weckmann’s original work had been copied by Ms. Hudson in the work “The Greatest Connection”.

As a general rule, copying is established by showing that the accused party had access to the copyrighted work and that there is a substantial similarity between the relevant parts of the accused and the copyrighted work – which, from the facts we gathered here, was indeed the situation.

After discussing our determination with both Anke and Melanie, Melanie offered to return her compensation for this design. Further, we came to an agreement with Ms. Weckmann that we would credit this design as being “Inspired by the work of Anke Weckmann.” In return, Ms. Weckmann has agreed to allow us to keep the shirt up for sale until it sells out, at which time the design will be retired forever – no reprints, no exceptions.

On a personal note, we would like to extend a sincere thank you to Anke Weckmann for her patience and for the professional manner in which she dealt with us during this difficult time. We would also like to thank Melanie Hudson for her cooperation in helping us resolve this matter. We hope that both artists will continue to submit designs and participate on Threadless.com.