Every time I hear about a new case of an independent designer being copied my heart sinks. The latest is the talented Hidden Eloise of Hide n Seek who has unfortunately been copied by Paperchase (update: Paperchase have now said that they bought the design from a reputable design company). She wrote about it on her blog yesterday and over 150 comments of support have been posted. People have also been causing a storm on Twitter, even the writer Neil Gaiman has joined in and shown support.
What can we as independent designers do though? How can we fight the large corporations? Hidden Eloise has said that the court expenses would be in the region of $40000 which is outrageous. How could any of us afford to pay that if faced with the same problem?
So what can we do instead? There are organisations such as ACID which stands for Anti Copying in Design they aim to help and inform on areas of copyright theft.
There are also petitions that you can sign, here are two on the government website:
Also have a look at the You thought we wouldn’t notice site. It’s a place to fight back and show what’s happened to you.
Another similar incident happened recently to two friends of Craft Candy. Lady Luck Rules OK, who is a previous stall holder at one of our fairs, contacted us to let us know about their problem, you can ready all about that on their blog here. Unfortunately this has happened a few times to them and they too have been copied by large companies, in this case ASOS. It sounds like they had more luck with getting the offending items removed from ASOS’s site though than Hidden Eloise has so far with Paperchase. Read the Lady Luck Rules OK blog for more helpful information on how they’ve dealt with the situation. Also last December Lola Pop, another stall holder of ours was copied by Topshop – or Freedom jewellery to be more precise. Read all about it on Kelly’s blog here.
Craft Candy send our support to you Hidden Eloise and hope that Paperchase stop selling the blatant copies and compensate you appropriately for making money on your stolen design. Good luck to you and anyone else who has had to suffer this unfortunate type of theft, I for one will never buy from Paperchase again.
