Justyna Dorsz

Copyright

Fighting copyright infringement

A while ago, I hired an attorney in Poland to deal with people who stole my designs. Some of them paid me compensation before I had to sue, so that was fine. But some refused. Unfortunately, then the pandemic happened and also my attorney got seriously sick and couldn’t work on my cases anymore, so that slowed things down.

I bet some thieves thought I forgot about them. No such luck.

Anyway, I hired a new attorney. He prepared and filed the lawsuits. And there will be more cases to follow.

(This is just a quick update to let you guys know that this is all still in progress in case you were wondering.)

DMCA takedown notice – form vs. email

My artwork is stolen so often that I need to send thousands of DMCA takedown notices each year.

To make the process as fast as possible, I use email templates. But most websites prefer to receive takedown notices via their forms. For example, every time I email a takedown notice to Etsy I receive an email asking me to submit future notices via their form.

Do they not realize that their form takes a few minutes to fill? Sending an email takes just a few seconds. I don’t want to waste my time filling out forms. I prefer to send emails wherever possible.

I can understand that Etsy prefers to receive filled out forms. They are easier to process. But I calculated that if I keep sending forms to Etsy, I will waste over a day of my life per year. And that’s just on Etsy. There are many more websites that I need to send takedown notices to.

If you need to send takedown notices, send them via email, instead of via form. Don’t waste more time than you need to.

Etsy accepts fake DMCA counter notices

The problem is:

  1. Someone is selling my art illegally on Etsy.
  2. So I file a DMCA takedown notice.
  3. Then Etsy removes the listings that I reported.
  4. But sometimes the infringers file fake counter notices, claiming that they have the rights to sell my designs.
  5. Etsy accepts those fake notices and restores the illegal listings.

I don’t yet know how to deal with this — I will need to consult my attorneys. Etsy is clearly accepting fake counter even though the notices are clearly not valid — for example, they don’t contain an address.

I don’t have a solution for this issue yet. I am simply writing it here to rise awareness. I know other must be facing the same problem.

Register your work

If you are an artist/designer/photographer, you likely had your art stolen and used illegally. If not, it’s just a matter of time. Every day thousands of thieves try to sell artwork they have no rights to. This is an ongoing problem, and it isn’t going away anytime soon.

But one thing that’s been changing is that more and more artists are fighting back and suing the infringers. Even if you don’t plan to sue anyone yet, you can still prepare for the future when you can invest some money in lawyers.

And the first step is to register your artwork in the US Copyright Office. You should think about it even before you publish your artwork because this way you can save a lot of money. When I started making designs, I knew nothing about registering copyright. And even when I found out about it, I still hesitated for months because I thought I couldn’t afford it..

Now, when I am finally registering my designs that are already published, I need to pay $45 for each design registration. If I’d registered them before publishing, I would have paid $85 for 10 designs.

Register your work.

Copyright

Every week I visit online stores and report all the listings with designs stolen from me.

Sometimes, the sellers who had their listings removed contact me. They claim they didn’t know that the image that they sold was copyrighted. If you are an honest person and want to learn about copyright so as not to make the same mistake again, then watch the Wholesale Ted youtube channel. I stumbled upon it yesterday and I watched 3 videos so far. I can already tell that the content is well researched, and you can learn a lot.

“I stole your designs but I demand your cooperation”

I found my designs sold illegally on Amazon. I didn’t bother contacting the sellers who listed my designs. I simply reported the listings to Amazon, and they were removed. As a result, many of those sellers have had their whole stores suspended for copyright infringement.

I’ve been getting emails from those sellers. Some have threatened me with legal actions, some have wanted to officially license my designs from me. Others have written me dozens of emails begging me to retract my complaints. Just today, I’ve received another of those emails. An Amazon seller had their store suspended, and they want me to withdraw my claim of copyright infringement. They hired a lawyer who keeps writing me emails like this one:

“In the attorney letter (I attached it one more time here now), we officially confirm, that our client has deleted the listings with your images and will never list them again in respect of your intellectual property rights. 
The client was educated on IP law and will be more careful with his future listings. 
Please kindly withdraw your claim“

The thieves, who stole from me, want me to help them have their stores — full of illegal designs — restored. I want to be clear on one thing.

I will never withdraw any of the copyright claims.

If you are one of those thieves or their lawyers, then please do keep sending me those pleading emails. You make me smile every time.

If you are an artist and had your art stolen, then never retract your claims of copyright infringement. If you retract your complaint, they will have their accounts reinstated. They might be careful and not steal from you again — they will instead steal from other artists. The only way to fight them is to have all their stores permanently removed.

Bundles with stolen designs

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

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.

“We are doing you a favor”

There’s a curious thing happening with some of the thieves.

It goes like this: my lawyer sends letters asking the illegal sellers to cease infringing on my copyright and pay me compensation. Some pay, some try to negotiate, some will be sued. But often, we receive the following kind of response:

“We haven’s sold any items with your design, so we won’t pay you, but we can let you sell your design on our website if you want.”

or:

“We sold only a few items, so we won’t pay you, but we can let you sell your design on our website if you want.”

or (this is from today, slightly paraphrased):

“We will pay you 15% of what you asked, and we can offer you an opportunity to sell your designs in our store. And, of course, we didn’t even sell that much and didn’t make a profit.”

Why do all those people think that they are doing me a favor by offering me the chance to display my designs in their stores? From what I gathered, they all don’t even sell things. The designs are displayed on their websites, and Facebook pages, and Twitter, and advertised on Instagram, but nope, we haven’t sold a thing with your design, or at most, like, 5 items, but send us your designs. Forgive me guys, I am sort of not seeing the point of working with someone who: steals designs or works with suppliers that do, refuses to compensate the artists, and implies that it can all be fixed if I just send them my designs, oh and by the way isn’t it an excellent opportunity for you, you poor artist, you get to sell designs in our store, one of the thousands of online stores on the Internet.

I hired a law firm (Update #2)

One thing that’s been on my mind recently is this whole situation with illegal sellers.

In December, I hired a lawyer and we sent requests to 19 people to stop selling my designs and pay me compensation. Recently, we’ve sent requests to 17 more people. But I’ve already found more. The most stolen one is: “Not Today”, followed by “Overthinking and also hungry”. Lately, people have been stealing my “All These Feelings” and “Vaguely Aware of Social Norms” too.

Designs stolen most often

This feels like it’s not going to ever end. As soon as we deal with illegal sellers, new ones show up. Some of the people contacted by my lawyer didn’t remove the listings with my designs. One person removed the listings, paid the compensation, and then started selling my design without permission again. All those cases will need to be resolved in court.

We have selected a few companies to sue first but one of them unexpectedly paid part of the money that they owed. That was a nice surprise — if they pay the rest, then it’s one less person to deal with.

Of all those people, the most upsetting is one company. I don’t want to say the name yet because it’s still possible that they will make it right. I used to buy clothes and shoes from them. I liked them! They are really huge — during Christmas when I visited my mom I saw their TV commercials. They can afford to hire artists and pay them. And yet, they stole two of my designs and didn’t pay me.