Octopus Overlords

So now my daughter has finally hit the big leagues.
Her art is now being stolen and sold by somebody else.

Here is her Etsy page and specifically, here is one of her pieces:
Dung Beetle


Today she discovered this shop on Amazon selling her work:



Besides filing a complaint with Amazon, I have no idea what recourse she has.

That sucks.

I'm guessing none. Which sucks even more.

Without having some sort of protection (copyright comes to mind) in place, I don't think there is much she can do.

I would consider taking it up with Amazon, though. And if Amazon refuses to act, I'd see about posting reviews of intellectual theft on the seller if you can.

I had some friends organize, hound, and trash a ripoff artist across the Internet until they stopped but I don't think that's the right answer.

First thing I found on the Internet also says copyright protect yourself. Especially if you are going to need to fear someone else taking your work and then claiming Intellectual Property over it.

https://www.superlawyers.com/resources/ ... rt-online/

It's likely someone far from the US. In fact, they might well be getting the orders for $9 and then putting in the order from Etsy with the Amazon customer's address.

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Sun Mar 12, 2023 7:42 pm It's likely someone far from the US.

You are correct:


Everything on their store is stolen from Etsy.

It's just a question of whether they're buying en masse from Etsy and reselling, routing orders through Etsy, or straight up copying the items (IE, scanning and printing them) themselves.

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Sun Mar 12, 2023 8:16 pm It's just a question of whether they're buying en masse from Etsy and reselling, routing orders through Etsy, or straight up copying the items (IE, scanning and printing them) themselves.

It looks to me like they are laser printing their own vinyl cutout stickers of other people's work and then shipping to the US from Ukraine. That's who it looks anyway.

LordMortis wrote: ↑Sun Mar 12, 2023 8:23 pm

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Sun Mar 12, 2023 8:16 pm It's just a question of whether they're buying en masse from Etsy and reselling, routing orders through Etsy, or straight up copying the items (IE, scanning and printing them) themselves.

It looks to me like they are laser printing their own vinyl cutout stickers of other people's work and then shipping to the US from Ukraine. That's who it looks anyway.

Yeah, I doubt they're buying them and reselling in order to make maybe $2 after shipping and fees but it's not impossible. The only way to find out is to order one from Amazon which I'm sure no one wants to do.


On a separate note, the real stickers are great! Will be huddling up with the kids to put an order in.

So I did try to submit a review on Amazon stating that this was stolen art work.
So far the review has not been posted and I've received three text messages stating that my "Amazon account has been suspended. Please to be clicking on this totally not bogus link to fix your account!"

A few years ago, I read an article about the same thing happening with apps. Someone created on that was a nifty idea (don't ask me what it was), and it was shortly cloned and resold more than a dozen times within 2 weeks.

This is why we can't have creative stuff.

Update: After filing a complaint with Amazon which was rejected as not offering enough proof (seriously?) and then filing a second complaint, Amazon removed the item from their page.

They haven't removed the seller so we will have to keep an eye on it.

Our tattoo artist friend who posts lots of pictures of his work reached out to her and offered her advice on how to add watermarks to all of her pictures as well as other ideas to help prevent similar events in the future.

Update #2:

So, before this happened they only had three products listed, right? Because they have a whole honkin' lot of 'popular stickers'.

Jeff V wrote: ↑Mon Mar 13, 2023 10:25 pm A few years ago, I read an article about the same thing happening with apps. Someone created on that was a nifty idea (don't ask me what it was), and it was shortly cloned and resold more than a dozen times within 2 weeks.

This is why we can't have creative stuff.

What are you talking about? You just said you had over a dozen apps to choose from. How many nice things do you need?

GreenGoo wrote: ↑Thu Mar 16, 2023 4:12 pm

Jeff V wrote: ↑Mon Mar 13, 2023 10:25 pm A few years ago, I read an article about the same thing happening with apps. Someone created on that was a nifty idea (don't ask me what it was), and it was shortly cloned and resold more than a dozen times within 2 weeks.

This is why we can't have creative stuff.

What are you talking about? You just said you had over a dozen apps to choose from. How many nice things do you need?

But a dozen of the same thing. The original creator became despondent and ate cheeseburgers until he exploded.

Jeff V wrote: ↑Thu Mar 16, 2023 9:23 pm But a dozen of the same thing. The original creator became despondent and ate cheeseburgers until he exploded.

Right, but after.

I got a Hello Kitty! themed app, and you got an Eeyore one. Win-win!

My only point is that your statement was logically incorrect. Presumably you meant to imply there are lots of nice things not invented (yet) because of copying. Which is a hard statement to back up, even if it makes some sense intuitively.

Discouraging creators is a proven fact, though. Are you suggesting that since we don't know what we are missing, we really aren't missing anything at all? That's a head-in-the-sand response that doesn't acknowledge the problem.

Copyright laws could be less obtuse for starters. I can declare this post to be copyright (c) 2023 by Jeff V and legally it is supposed to be protected. In practice, however, I cannot defend the copyright and sue your ass for quoting it without permission without first registering it. I'm not sure what the current process is, but if it's anything more than an upload and a token fee that provides you with a time stamp, then it's not serving the creator very well. The contention process, in most cases, need not be drawn out legal affairs -- an immediate "cease and desist" order could be issued based on the time stamp, and it would be up to the challenged to show evidence of a prior claim (ie, earlier timestamp). Failure to abide by the cease-and-desist order would accumulate devastating fines, split between the government and the aggrieved party. When the stakes become high enough, then the lawyers get involved. I'm sure there are more effective processes that could be implemented, this is just off the top of my head after a long day.

I'm actually with Jeff on this one. It's great for the users to have dozens of variant apps to choose from, yes. But what happens when one person spends a year developing one, puts it up for sale, and has a dozen foreign companies copy-paste his code with a different graphic. They give it a similar name and icon to the original just to confuse people, and maybe even have bots download it to push it above the original in the listings, effectively confusing customers who just go with the 'trending' option. In the end he ends up getting two or three percent of the sales all of his work generated. And if he gets the company removed from the stores, they just change their name and graphic and do it again.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that it is going to affect how willing he is to develop another app. I've certainly read stories about devs who have created something new and have quit (or gone out of business) after having it repeatedly copied and sold without their permission.

So, yeah. We have a dozen cheap knock-offs of each app so we can have Hello Kitty or Eeyore, but we get fewer original apps. Or original pieces of art.

For fuck's sake Blackhawk, we're real life friends, aren't we? We don't always have to be diametrically opposed, even if you do live a dark red state and me a deep blue one...

Jeff V wrote: ↑Sat Mar 18, 2023 1:15 am For fuck's sake Blackhawk, we're real life friends, aren't we? We don't always have to be diametrically opposed, even if you do live a dark red state and me a deep blue one...

We've got more of an Oscar and Felix dynamic.

Jeff V wrote: ↑Sat Mar 18, 2023 12:29 am Discouraging creators is a proven fact, though.

Is it, though? How do you prove that flying cars don't exist because IP law is not strong enough?

We've been over this so many times, not going to do it all over again. The reason we have IP law is to encourage more art for the public. Not paywall it.

I used to run a personal blog, and was shocked to discover during my searches that my entire feed had been somehow pilfered and copied onto a sketchy bogus blog aimed at capturing search results. It was fairly discouraging and after learning that, I stopped posting on it.

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Sat Mar 18, 2023 12:23 pm

Jeff V wrote: ↑Sat Mar 18, 2023 1:15 am For fuck's sake Blackhawk, we're real life friends, aren't we? We don't always have to be diametrically opposed, even if you do live a dark red state and me a deep blue one...

We've got more of an Oscar and Felix dynamic.

Yet they still coexist, right?

I did come down on your side on this one, after all...