Etsy threating Suspension over images stolen from US! What Can We Do?

[CelticEternity]

Etsy has flagged us for "multiple" violations of their "creativity standards", and is now threatening to shut us down!

We have had an Etsy shop for 12+ years selling jewelry that we make entirely ourselves in our Denver, Colorado based workshop, from design to production. 6 people (yes, all listed in our shop) make every piece, and we've done almost 15K sales on this store (we have 3 others selling different things, which we also make ourselves except for selling vintage cameras) in the time we've been on Etsy. This is for all of us, our ONLY job, so our personal income is entirely reliant on Etsy. This has worked well, but now it's being threatened.

Our items have been knocked-off with greater and greater frequency, and while we've worked diligently to get these taken down (working with Pixsy and personally filling out countless reports), we've found stolen images of our designs EVERYWHERE (from Amazon to Temu and eBay, and all the other usual offenders, even here on Etsy). The reality is that our images are being used on many sites, and we have no way of getting them all to be taken down since many are in China or overseas and don't conform to the same intellectual property protections.

Now, Etsy is flagging US for selling knock-offs because our images have been stolen! We had the first item flagged on Oct. 7th. We have disputed this flag with Etsy, and have not had any resolution, despite following up multiple times. It is a design that we've made and had up since 2017 (long before anyone knocked it off, it's still the original listing). Now we have had a SECOND listing (this one originally created in 2019) flagged (removing our Star Seller badges), along with a note from Etsy stating that if there are any more "violations" our account will be "suspended"!

We're about to head into the busiest part of the year, and frankly are freaking out a bit. Etsy has not reached out to us to resolve this, and it seems a matter of time until their automatic system flags another "violation" based on an image stolen from us. Does anyone have any solution to this? Etsy does not seem able to resolve either of the violations, and our livelihood is on the line here. Anyone know who to contact about this? We've already opened tickets and responded to the violations.

But please, if anyone has any other resources to get this solved we'd be quite grateful, we're in a panic that we may get suspended with no recourse!

[Duckwells]

I can’t help except to note that someone in the forums uses a service that crawls the internet and issues takedown notices.  Maybe someone reading this can provide more info

[VintageRescueSquad]

The only way to fight this is to issue takedown notices to those sites that are showing your photos. Then, provide copies of the takedowns to etsy to prove that you are proactively protecting your IP (photos).

As Duckwells mentioned, there is a service that will do search for them and issue takedowns. No idea how much it costs.

[ModJose · Accepted solution]

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