Rachael Taylor fights online art theft
Designer, Rachael Taylor, has taken online image library, Shutterstock, to task for hosting material from another artist that is clearly a copy of her own work.
Writing in her blog, Rachel describes how a Shutterstock artist called Sasha Yesik had uploaded blatant copies of her work (right) to the image library.
"I'm outraged. It’s happening way too much now, designers should respect each others
work," said Rachael. "We all take inspiration from other peoples designs, but it’s
completely unacceptable to blatantly copy a piece and claim it as
your own original idea!
"I hope my situation has raised awareness & hopefully it will prevent this happening again to anyone else."
Shutterstock responded to the complaint quickly and removed the listing from its site (right) and suspended Yesik's account before releasing this statement.
“Shutterstock cares deeply about copyrights. As a policy, we require all our contributors to warrant that the work they submit is their own. (You can see our policy here: http://submit.shutterstock.com/tostos.mhtml -- section 11c.) We have a review process in place to prevent fraud. This process usually works very well.
In this case, Rachael Taylor brought our attention to an image by a Shutterstock contributor that looked almost identical to one of her designs. We responded within minutes by pulling down that contributor's entire portfolio. Once we had time to gather more information, we decided to ban the contributor from Shutterstock. We also contacted the 8 customers who downloaded the image, asked them to delete it, and tried to figure out if the image had been used anywhere. This process is ongoing. Nobody is happy about this, least of all us. Fortunately, this is not typical for our site. Shutterstock has over 11 million images and reports of infringement are extremely rare.”
GT's Design Community correspondent, Gill Davies, commented: "It's sad to report the ever-present threat to copyright is benefiting from the world-wide web and large suppliers of stock images - in this case a particularly crude, and ultimately fruitless, effort to use someone else’s existing artwork for gain."
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