Hi all
I would have thought this thread and the issue of stolen digital patterns and IP would have been a hot topic in here. See this forum discussion
http://www.etsy.com/teams/7722/discussions/discuss/13123244/page/23I for one stupidly never considered theft on this scale could happen and most of the threads I have read concerning IP are concerned with people making and selling clothing or goods from patterns. That small time compared to this. This issue has the potential to affect each team member. This issue is concerned with the wholesale theft of patterns from esty sellers and resale of digital patterns for profit and or to obtain customers personal information for fraudulent purposes.
The question really is as a small business person how can you protect yourself? I actually don't think you can realistically. You could spend all your time and energy chasing around the web checking to see if someones stolen your work, and when you find it, spend valuable time trying to get some kind of redress, you could try lawyers as the like, but for these type of scams, you will end up chasing your tail and spending time and money you don't have.
The only solution I can see, is that small business digital pattern makers collectively act to notify the community when a scammer is operating and collectively act to lobby (email, send reports to FB, Twitter, google, virus software companies etc to have these sites isolated.)
I see that with the current site their FB, twitter and feeds have been removed, but there site still does not come up as unsafe.
What do you think?
