One of the worst nightmares for a designer is probably theft. Someone steals your work, sells it and earns money from it. It just got worse.
Jon Engle is a graphic designer from New Mexico. The last year has been a hell from him, after a stock art site stole his work, sold it and then sued him – claiming that he had stole their work. Read his blog post about the situation and give him your support.
This is very worrying. If you read the blog post, Jon Engle writes that the same stock site has done this once before. What’s preventing other stock sites to do exactly the same? I suggest we all keep our eyes open, keep backup of any mails, drafts and other things that can be used as proof.
I seen another stock site with a full site template which belonged to a well known designer or design studio. Scary!
Oh, that’s terrible. I also found one of my designs on a template site once… fortunately they didn’t sue me when I confronted them.
@Jason – What kind of template site?
One of those uber-cheap ones! I think it was like $10 or something…. lovely to know your work is held in such high esteem :(
It was a couple of years back. Some guy alerted us to somebody ripping one of our sites. When we asked him what was going on he plead innocence and sent us a link to a template site. When we confronted them they said a designer had sold it to them. And it went on round-and-round in circles. Oh well.
Who’s really the bad guy? Blog post from the Logo Factory.
it seems there’s more than one side to that story…
Who knows where this will end, but this is a well founded journalistic look at the case that surprised the article author…
http://www.thelogofactory.com/logo_blog/index.php/stock-logos-copyright-twitter/
I was recently working with a speaker/presenter on his website, and working together turned into a horror show. I agreed to design his website, and everything was good at first. Later the guy believed that his money could buy everything. It turns out he was planning to have a web maid, instead of a web designer. After the overall design was agreed on, he continued to request constant changes to the design, text, images, and photos. As a speaker, he was great, as a client, he “SUCKED”. Keep away from speakers!