One artist offers a discount code on genuine merch: 'FUCKBOOTLEGGERS'
Matt Buchholz’s artwork is usually a hit during the holidays. Under the name Alternate Histories, he creates surreal landscapes of sci-fi staples — think Godzilla or flying saucers — appearing around major cities, which he prints on giftable items like postcards and calendars. But this year, Buchholz found himself with unexpected competitors: counterfeiters ripping off his designs and offering them for sale via Facebook ads.
“I’m not sleeping well; I wake up to another person tagging me in a post with a new thing like, ‘Oh look, now they’re selling my Christmas card’,” Buchholz said. “It’s been really draining. I’ve really had to kind of push myself to keep going through it.” Corinne Pavlovic, vice president of trust and safety at Etsy, said in a statement that the platform is committed to protecting creative works. “We comply with applicable intellectual property laws by assessing all reports, removing items when we receive proper notices of infringement and terminating sellers who receive repeat notices of infringement,” Pavlovic toldEven people who should be experts in copyright matters can struggle to contend with takedown policies.
reported in November that a 2018 internal Facebook analysis found 40 percent of its pages traffic went to pages that stole or recycled most of their content. And that’s just Facebook.Beyond the lost revenue, Buchholz says he’s worried about damage to his reputation as well. During a recent sweep of Amazon for fakes in late January, he found yet another egregious example of a counterfeit of his work, along with several one-star reviews from angry and disappointed customers.
“One of the big problems with our copyright infrastructure on the internet is it was really designed around what was happening in the mid- to late ’90s, before Napster,” Schultz said in an interview withIn the olden days of the 1990s, it took a long time to download a file, and the internet was more like a new social network with a small audience, he says.
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