Alternate Visions

Please stay caring and aware, friends. 🩵💙🩵 Digital art theft is still theft, and very much affects real people. 💙💙💙

Unfortunately we need to talk about Shein again (and Temu, and Wish, and AliExpress, and large parts of Amazon).

This is my rat pin design, stolen and being sold for 88p (how on earth can I compete with 88p?).

Counterfeit pins have been a problem for a long time, but nowadays these people can just scroll through Etsy and use AI tools to rip and recreate anything and everything. It's not just pins any more - it's almost every type of item. And it's being done on a vast scale, affecting almost every artist and small business selling online. If you don't think your designs have been stolen yet, you've just not been made aware of it.

I know we're all struggling at the moment, and it's really tempting to order cute stuff from cheap Chinese selling sites in order to save money. But so many of these items are counterfeit, and it's independent artists who are paying the price. As well as the economies of your own countries, as none of this money is going back into them.

Getting these items taken down is a long and difficult process, and in the time it takes to tackle just one, thousands of others can pop up. In the absence of better regulations against IP theft, the only long term solution to this is to make it not profitable to steal designs, by boycotting the sellers and selling apps involved in this.

I know of other small businesses that have lost huge amounts of money and even been forced to close due to this. Please, please do your research before buying anything online.

(Thank you to the kind follower who made me aware of this particular theft. I rely on you all to be my eyes when it comes to tracking this stuff down!)