Wendy Sloan of Mainsail Studio lost business when a copycat ripped off her designs, which she was selling on Spoonflower. She now prefers making her own custom wing costumes, plush animal heads, and other items and selling them directly to consumers.
Photo courtesy of Wendy Sloan.
Wendy Sloan was thrilled when an upscale children’s boutique agreed to purchase exclusive rights to one of her designs, which she was selling on Spoonflower. But two weeks later, a boutique associate called, irate, to cancel the agreement because they found those designs being used on “low-quality dresses and ruffle outfits” being sold online for $5 to $36.
Someone had stolen her designs and printed them on cheap fabric used on garments made in China, marketed as “affordable girls boutique clothing,” Sloan says.
“My sales were immediately affected,” says Sloan, who owns Mainsail Studio. “Several handmade shops stopped showing custom items with my designs and stopped reordering the fabric (from Spoonflower). Spoonflower fabric is costly, and its uniqueness justified higher prices for handmade items. However, once the design was compromised, it lost its special value.”
Besides the business loss, Sloan says, “The psychological impact was significant.”
She moved away from online sales and today sells custom wing costumes, plush animal heads, and more at Painted Tree Boutiques, pop-ups, and through word of mouth. “The copyright infringement battle helped me realize my real strength and passion is in my handmade items, not print-on-demand products and textiles.”
Sloan is not alone. Design theft is a common – and demoralizing – problem for creators. And sadly, the larger your audience, the more vulnerable you are.
Relentless
“It’s a nightmare,” says Anne Oliver, who sells embroidery designs and kits at Lolli & Grace. “My best-selling design (Kaleidoscope) and at least one other design were stolen. They purchased a PDF pattern from my Etsy shop and within a few days had it for sale on multiple websites. They used one of my Instagram videos to run Facebook ads and were selling kits made from information in the PDF pattern.”
In her nearly 13 years of business, Oliver says, she’s had photos and a few designs stolen, but “I’ve never had one as relentlessly marketed as this one.”
Here are some tips from makers and attorneys on how to handle design theft:
- Register your copyright by going to U.S. Copyright Office. If you don’t register a copyright, you still have ownerships and rights in your original work at the moment you create it and reduce it to tangible form,” says attorney Jen Becker. But, she adds, “The sooner you enforce your rights and protect your intellectual property the better.”
- “Registering your work might get costly, so prioritize your bestsellers and key pieces,” says Wendy Sloan of Mainsail Studio. “If scammers see you haven’t registered anything, they think you won’t fight back, and they may target you.”
- Act swiftly and confidently to protect your work, says Laura Piland of Slice of Pi Quilts. “File DMCA takedown notices to the ecommerce platforms when possible.”
- Using watermarks on your designs makes it harder to take screenshots of your designs, but some sites don’t like the aesthetics.
- Report the theft to places where you post, such as Facebook, Etsy, or Shopify, and file DMCA takedown orders (available in the U.S. but not all countries). “This is the best weapon we have,” says Carolina Moore of Carolina Moore Patterns.
- Alert your followers on social media. However, Lisa van Klaveren of Holland Designs, notes that, “After a while it gets to be so much negativity, I sometimes think it’s best to not bring it up anymore.”
- Stay vigilant, says attorney Kiffanie Stahle. “But don’t let it rule your life.”
- Create for the joy of creating, and don’t let the thieves steal that joy. “Focus on the positives,” van Klaveren adds.
–Roberta G. Wax
“We are seeing more and more of this,” notes designer Carolina Moore, of Carolina Moore Patterns, who, in the middle of her father’s celebration of life in 2021, discovered that her newly launched Boxed Bag Template was being sold on a “scam website, using my Instagram Reel to promote the counterfeit version.
“It was a blatant copy,” Moore says. “They used my photos. They used the insert I’d created, covering up my logo with (theirs). They used my video as an ad. They mirrored the template (and the text) and used a filter of stars over my video. They were offering small, medium, and large versions of my ruler, which was designed as a one-size-fits-all template, and selling it for 50% of my MSRP.”
Moore, who has posted two videos, here and here, about scam sites, reported the ad to Facebook and filed a *DMCA takedown order. “It’s such a violation. All the hard work to get the product created, and these folks just did a copy-paste.”
Moore is fighting back, relentlessly tracking down fakes and filing DMCA takedowns. “I want to be a nuisance, not worth counterfeiting.”
The pattern for Anne Oliver’s best-selling embroidery design, Kaleidoscope, was destined to be stolen by copycats, who look for popular designs to steal. “I’m so cynical now that all I can say is, ‘if you create a good and popular product, it’s not a matter of IF it will stolen, but WHEN.'”
Photo courtesy of Anne Oliver.
The fight
Fighting the theft battle is annoying, draining, and can be expensive if you need to hire an attorney.
“Psychologically, it’s awful,” says Oliver. “I felt sick about it. I constantly worry about how many people they are scamming using my design, and how angry people would be when they got a kit that was cheap, crappy, or missing materials. If they ever see this design again and my name IS attached to it, will they think I’m the scammer? The simmering anger, frustration, and fear never goes away.”
Besides patterns and designs, these scammers “steal a designers joy,” says Lisa van Klaveren of Holland Designs Crochet, who has lost several patterns to copycats and posted a YouTube video about the issue. “This causes a lot of stress, partly because you need to try to deal with it, and when you can’t, you just have to let it go to save your mental health. I can’t be positively creative while dealing with negativity.”
Laura Piland, of Slice of Pi quilts, found fighting the fraudulent sites that copied her patterns, daunting and overwhelming. “But once I knew how to combat them,” she says, “I felt empowered and confident.”
Photo courtesy of Laura Piland.
Wendi Gratz, who sells embroidery, quilt, stuffed animal and crochet patterns at her shop Shiny Happy World, has had designs stolen almost since she opened in 2010.
“I file takedown notices, but they pop up again almost immediately, with identical inventory and just a new name and ‘about’ page. It’s an endless game of whack-a-mole.”
Laura Piland, who sells paper and PDF patterns on her Slice of Pi site, found fighting the fraudulent sites daunting and overwhelming. “But once I knew how to combat them, I felt empowered and confident.” (See her tips below.)
How to protect your work
So how can makers fight copycats and protect their work?
First, experts advise, copyright your designs through the U.S. Copyright Office.
“Registering your copyright gives you the strongest protection,” explains attorney Kiffanie Stahle, who is also a photographer “and fellow creative business owner.”
“If you register your copyright either before the copycat strikes or within three months of ‘first publication’, which is when first putting your product for sale, you don’t have to prove how much you lost but the copycat has to pay your attorney fees, so you are more likely to find an attorney who will work on a contingency fee because they know there’s that pot of money at the end. Enforcing your copyright with our U.S. copyright system without the registration protection is like using a fly swatter instead of baseball bat.”
Watermarks on designs make it more difficult for copycats to take screen shots or other image captures, adds attorney Jen Becker of Matchstick Legal. However, van Klavern notes that some sites discourage this because it “detracts from the beauty of the image.”
Some designers are so discouraged by design thefts they may give up or make their patterns free on their blog in hope of earning money via ad revenue, says Lisa van Klaveren of Holland Designs. But for her, “designing is what I do and will always do. I do not allow these momentary problems to get in my way. I prefer to sell a quality product at a good price, rather than trying to earn money from clicks and ads on a blog.”
Photo courtesy of Lisa van Kalveren.
While it’s tempting to want to publicly call out copycats, Stahle urges caution, and she tells her clients to call her before posting anything. Calling a company out, she says, “should be done with caution because it can put you in a worse position from a legal standpoint.”
Consumers should also take precautions and be aware of scammers, makers agree.
“Look for funny sounding names, and descriptions that may be generic or poorly worded,” says van Klaveren.
Be an educated consumer, Moore adds. “Buy from reputable sources, such as local, in-person quilt shops. If buying online, know who you’re buying from. If it is a stand-alone website, check their social media ‘about’ sections. Real companies have real social media with real people out front.”
And if the price seems too good to be true, beware.
Most designers want consumers to alert them of copycats.
“Even though it takes my time and drains my creative energy, I want those scam sites taken down,” says Moore. “I don’t want them profiting off of my creativity.”
Embroidery designer Kelly Fletcher of Kelly Fletcher Needlework Design, is thankful for alert blog readers who recognize her images and find and report copycats, allowing her to “resolve incidents fairly quickly.”
Fletcher says she’s been lucky to have just one or two thefts over the years, but a recent one was a doozy, with her 120 Embroidery Stitches book used almost verbatim.
But years ago, she says, when she first started creating digital patterns, her husband warned her: “Most people will happily respect your work, but a small percentage will steal it. So, make your peace with it now and stay focused on creating.”
*Digital Millennium Copyright Act gives copyright owners legal protections against unauthorized access to their work.
Laura Piland of Slice of Pi Quilts shared her tips, which she posted on her Facebook page, of what to do if you find your designs have been copied:
- Fill out the contact form on their website to demand the products be removed from their site due to copyright violation. Give links to the exact listings on their site in your message. Be clear and firm. No need to be nice or give second chances. Your artwork is copyrighted, and they do not have permission to use your art.
- Submit a DMCA takedown notice to their e-commerce platform. You can use the website builtwith.comto find out who the e-commerce platform for this website is. Then on that ECOM’s website, there will be a way to submit a DMCA takedown notice (either a form or list of what to include in an email). Be as clear, succinct, and specific as possible. This usually gets the listing removed within 24 business hours.
- You can submit DMCA takedown notices to their webhost, server, etc., but I have much quicker success with the e-commerce platform.
- Search the Facebook ad library for this company and the name they are using to sell this item to see if there are any active ads running for this specific product. If so, then report the ad to Facebook as a copyright violation using this form. Often, the website or e-commerce platform removes the listing, making the Facebook ad a dead link. Facebook is usually very slow to respond to these claims, so the link is usually broken by the time they finally get to it.
— Laura Piland
Roberta G. Wax
Contributor
Roberta Wax is an award-winning journalist and imperfect crafter. A former news reporter, her freelance articles and projects have appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines, from the Los Angeles Times and Emmy magazine to Cloth Paper Scissors, Somerset Studio, Craftideas, Belle Armoire, etc. She has also designed for craft companies. Although she has no art background she was a crafty Girl Scout leader. www.creativeunblock.com
It’s a soul sucking dilemma when this happens. Reiterating…. it’s not IF, it’s WHEN. You need to be as diligent as you can afford both mentally and financially while being able to move to the next design or product. I sympathize with you all. Alexis
I haven’t seen them recently, but I have seen ads for big sets of crochet patterns — like 1000 patterns for super ridiculously cheap and I just want to reply to everyone in the comments….don’t they realize these patterns are all stolen???? Who can honestly think it is reasonable to pay pennies for that many patterns!! (I know, there will always be people that don’t care. Sigh)
I have thought about entering the pattern design space and honestly, it’s just so disheartening I don’t even want to get started.
I had the opposite problem. I had a retail fabric store and during covid when I took my store online and had posts of photos that I took myself I started receiving take down orders that I was violating copyright by using others photos. At first i was a bit mystified but then began receiving multiple emails from mutiple “artists”.