Jelle Pingen

Art theft/ripping, how to deal with it?

Written on August 30, 2010

I’d like to start by saying that I’m usually not the person to publicly accuse others. The days of the pillory are over. However, I’m at my wits’ end, I really don’t know what to do anymore. So I’m writing this blog post as some sort of last resort.

I believe art theft (or ripping, as some call it) is something every artist, whether they’re a professional or amateur, will have to deal with at least once in their carreer. Especially sites like deviantART make it easy to simply copy other’s work and upload it to your own gallery. Ofcourse do they have a report system, and usually the stolen work gets taken down pretty fast (props to the DA staff!). Some people even argue that you should be proud when your work get ripped, because it means you produce quality work, worthy to be stolen. Seriously? Are you proud too when your bike gets stolen, because it means you had a cool bike? I can’t blame deviantART for it though, it’s the way the internet works. I’ve seen people copying other sites’ source code (including CSS and images), upload it to their own server and call themselves a web designer. Those are times that some sort of internet police would come in handy! Instead, you’ll have to contact the thief himself. Or, if he/she (contrary to popular belief, there actually are girls on the internet) won’t listen, contact the host to get the site taken down. In the worst case, drag their ass to court.

And that brings me to what happened to me a few weeks ago. I frequently visit a nice design community called Encide, where Raza was so kind to point me to an app in the Apple appstore. You’ve probably seen the little image up there. It’s a piece I created over a year ago, called Radius. We just got Mario Kart for the Wii at the time, so you can guess where the inspiration comes from. Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks it resembles a steering wheel. Because since a few months, it’s actually being used as a steering wheel. Yep, that’s right. They copied my work, modified it a bit, used it in a steering wheel app and are now selling it in the Apple appstore.

The first thing I did when I found out about this was contacting the app developer. I got a very nice reply back, saying “this is artwork, fuck you!”. So I turned to Apple. I explained the whole situation, showed them the emails I sent to and received from the app developer, and even added the .psd file as proof. After a few emails back and forth with some Apple representative it got clear that there wasn’t really anything they could do. They told me that the content of the apps sold in the appstore isn’t their responsibility, and wished me good luck in court.

So here I am, unsure about what to do. A lawyer is way too expensive for a poor student like me, and it doesn’t really seem worth the hassle. Still, it’s bugging me that some guy from China (no, I got nothing against chinese people) is making money using my work. It’d be great if someone got some tips for me on how to deal with a situation like this! Help a fellow designer

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