Since the popularity of my prints have risen - I've found prints that are mine, being sold by other people. But, all cases have been resolved by a simple e-mail asking someone to stop. I wish I never had to e-mail to ask. People - you just shouldn't copy. Do people think that the web is so big that they will never be caught? Do they not want to feel good about their own creativity, and come up with something original themselves? I often wonder many things when I see work that is copied.
Most recently, there is someone who actually lives in the same town as I do, who has a pattern of mimicking my work and business model of The Penny Paper Co. I'll post a sale, and a few hours later - she'll do the same thing for her business. It happens so much that it has become a little joke. Apart from being a little bit of an annoyance, it's not worth addressing with her. But it was enough to make me keep my eye on her. The joking stopped after this past weekend.
When I checked in on her site this weekend, as I regularly do she took a design of mine, and is selling it as her own. And, I burst out into tears. (Stress makes me maybe more prone to crying - so maybe it was an accumulation of things) Remember my beautiful bunting I made for Oscar?
I allowed people to download it for personal use (I even wrote that in the post)
She had it as an item on her website, selling for resale. [Photo has been removed, explanation below]
The colours of the triangles are identical - she uses 100% of my colours - none of them are different, but she also uses the same pattern/combination of colours - See the second row --- green, pink, blue, orange ... That can't be a coincidence.
I think art is always inspired by someone, or something - I get inspired by a colour I may see used in a magazine, or a font I see somewhere that I think I would like to try. Being "inspired" is much different than copying. And that's why I was so sad, I saw this as a copy.
I'm posting to show you that this kind of stuff above - kills me. If I ever get all up in arms about crediting photos properly, this is why. This is why I posted about sourcing Style at Home for the Ikea Rast project. [Blogged about crediting here] I know how it feels when you do something and it is taken and someone else gets credit for it. Anyhow, this is no longer in my hands - I passed it off to someone else to deal with. But it kind of made me really sad the whole weekend, and for the week.
P.S., I'm not posting her name because I don't want to come off as pointing fingers or attacking someone, it's just that I was so bummed out at this.
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UPDATE: October 26th 3:30pm.
The person and I spoke on the phone with regards to this and came to an agreement. She agreed to remove the design from her site, if I agreed to remove the screen shot in my post, as well as delete the mention of her name directly in this comment section. It was an ackward possition for me, as I have never, ever deleted one of your comments before. But, I felt it best to come to a resolution and move on so I agreed to remove any direct mention of her name, or her company in the comment section. [Once again, for the record, I never once mentioned who it was] I just wanted my design, that I knew was mine, to not be sold elsewhere. We have a resolution, I need to move on and focus on pretty things. :)