Hey Talonos2,
We at Balloon Co. [gaming division] have a HUGE variety of people working with us. Some employees have been here since before whoever is typing this and translating for us was even a drooling baby. Others come and go constantly: the current record for a single employee shouting "I'll never work here again, I'm packing my bags and moving" and coming back a few weeks later is 37 times! Finally, there's also employees who only work with us for an exclusive limited time only due to what they often say is a "morbid curiosity." As such, the artist in charge of that particular sprite work is one of those "I can't do this for the rest of my life, my parents were right, I should go to medical school" kinda weirdos, so we don't have a record where they got the sprite from. The disqualification DID reach the ears of the upper ups in the company, and they did they're own secret private investigation. They sent us the results, which said that they didn't "blame" us for the mistake, but also explained that they were unable to track down the original sprite image. They suspect that the open sourced artist may have been the one who performed the rip, not us, due to us "not being capable of anything of that magnitude." We took great pleasure/minor 2nd degree burns incinerating that paternalistic garbage letter (don't tell our lawyers: they still think we have it locked in a safe deposit box)
But more importantly, this opened our eyes to the power imbalance in the toxic relationship between a powerful corporation running a contest and the weak artists competing in it. Did you know that in 2014, this contest gave a gift card prize to EVERYONE just for competing and not getting disqualified? We were confused, because we were used to corporations only doing profitable stuff (except us of course). Even we got one, but we kept our non-profit status with a little strategy called "trying to use it after the expiration date and realizing we lucked out." Our research indicates that this "corporate generosity" is a super secret corporation strategy called "grooming," where the corporation does really nice stuff to woo you, but when once you've decided to marry the corporation, they stop and return to monetizing their assets or whatever those biz people do. In 2015, such a prize was no where to be found. Well, we're breaking up with this groom! And that's why we're leading the fight for you! And, if someone is reading over your shoulder right now, also YOU TOO! They're trying to pit us all against each other with their dowries of "cash prizes" and "publishing deals", but now we know who the real final boss is! It's not the people without power, it's the powerful corporations!
Note from Lawyers: The above statement may not apply if you live in an area that has granted person hood to corporations.