Follow up Copyright infringement

Things have been busy here at the studio. I wanted to follow up on the Lee Hiller copyright infringement situation. I contacted Amazon immediately and they shut down all her pages with my copyrighted designs. I contacted the president of Andover Fabrics since all of the infringed designs I had licensed to them for over the counter fabrics. At last count, there were literally dozens and dozens of designers who had the same issues that I did regarding this woman ripping off our designs. I contacted her directly and told her that she was using my work illegally and that I was contacting my IP lawyer if she didn't take all my designs down off her website, Amazon, Cafe Press, Zazzle and other sites of that type. Unfortunately, someone like her can just take designs that do not belong to them and go on sites that allow you to put the designs on a mug, plate, key ring, etc over and over again. Not any design to it, she just slapped it down in a most amateurish way that I find degrading to my work as well as embarrassing. These sites allow people and artists to take a design and place it on a multitude of products so that they can look like they have licensed artwork on the market. Many legitimate artists use this to show their work on products, particularly inexperience ones who want to have products to show with their work. It gives them a chance to show the world what they can do. The sites have a caveat at the start of the process that asks that you guarantee that you are the sole owner of the designs, when in truth of course she was not, far from it. You do NOT have to prove your copyright, so it is really just expecting people to tell the truth...and guess what? So until someone steps forward to cry "Foul!", they keep selling the items with your designs on it. Anyhow, after many e mails, letters etc. Ms Hiller has finally taken down of all my infringed designs and I believe those of others as well and I check her website from time to time to make sure she is not continuing this practice. The strange thing is she claims to be a photographer and has a copyright claimer on her website telling folks not to use her photographs without her permission..interesting, huh? I actually asked her where she got my artwork from. She claims she bought a CD from Indonesia that supports local children that had all my designs on it along with the others. Good Story, but a lie. She most likely just went on our websites or those of our fabric companies and just took the images off, erased my copyright and added her own. She is a thief, just like any thief that robs a bank, she stole copyrighted designs that belonged to me, put them under her name and sold them on the internet to make a profit. How sad. How illegal. How aggravating! Someone like her that has little or no talent of their own so that they need to steal from other artists is just really pathetic. For now things are quiet and I appreciate all the responses on Facebook and e mail from those of you who were following this. I have moved on, there is no point to spending too much time on this, she was deluged with dozens of designers contacting her who went after her quickly when they realized their designs were also infringed. What it does show, however, is that in this day of social media, people learn quickly about this sort of thing and we can get it shut down just as quickly with all of us networking to keep copyright infringers at bay.

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