What often happens: someone steals my designs and designs from other artists, then bundles them together, and then sells those bundles for pennies on Etsy, eBay, Creative Fabrica, etc.
People buy those bundles and try to list designs from the bundles on sites like TeePublic, or Redbubble, or Amazon. Then, I, or my lawyer, have to request for those listings with my designs to be removed. And then I get emails from confused people, who thought that they had bought bundles legally and they had their listings removed. And now they want to know what happened.
Thing is, a lot, maybe most, of those bundles are illegal. People who sell them didn’t make the designs and didn’t pay others to make them. They stole designs from artists like me and sell them without permission.
If you are one of the people who want to buy bundles of designs to sell them on apparel on various websites then sooner or later an artist will spot their design in your store. And you will be hit with a notice of copyright infringement.
How to avoid those situations? For starters, don’t ever buy bundles that are weirdly cheap. Think about it, creating a design takes anywhere from one hour to a few days. No artist would sell their design for $5. Some of those bundles cost $5 and contain 30 or 50 or even 150 designs! That’s just not feasible.
You, most likely, want to have a legitimate store with legal designs, not stolen from artists. But you can never be certain if designs that you buy in bundles are sold legally. To be completely sure that designs are legal you have to either make the designs yourself or hire an artist to make designs for you.
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