Litigate. And Repeat.

Facebook friends posted earlier in the week about having your art ripped off by design companies. Indignation all around. Seems that wholesaler Cody Foster can’t come up with original designs for its… design business, so instead, they cruise the internet and hijack work from people like designer Lisa Congdon.

A despicable act, especially since the chances of being found out are pretty damn high. It seems though, that it’s a fairly wide-reaching problem. In a disturbing LA Times piece, the mechanisms to achieve such copying are minimal:

“A designer’s original work might premiere at a trade show and, as fast as photos can be emailed, an overseas factory is reproducing the look with less-costly materials and labor.”

Does it stop at material goods? Intellectual property, aka, content, is even more easily copied with the weight of this odious practice falling squarely on the shoulders of content farms. SEO is, realistically, nothing more than copying content and reworking it just to the edge of legality.

Sadly, it seems that the cost of going to court is simply built into the content “development:”

“This all makes you wonder if Cody Foster builds the legal & lawyer fees involved into the cost of running their business. They have ripped off so many artists, received a lot of bad publicity on the internet over the years, and been approached by countless artists and lawyers. And yet they still continue to steal from artists without apology or explanation.”