DIY, Crowd Sourcing or Piracy – You be the Judge

It seems that on the Internet you can run, but you can’t hide. If you’re up to no good, or trying to play the system somebody will always find you. And someone will always rat you out.

One of my fellow coworkers, Brent Pelloquin, came across this little gem of a blog post from Steve Douglas of The Logo Factory entitled “The Perils of Do-It-Yourself Logo Makers.” Go ahead, read it. I’ll wait.

Here’s the gist — there is a firm, website or whatever called the LogoGarden which is, and I quote: “…poised to disrupt online logo design and biz card space” with their DIY logo maker thingy. If by disrupt they mean steal, pilfer, pillage and plunder copyrighted material, and intellectual property that was paid for by other businesses; then yes.

This site is essentially a clearing house for pirated or stolen material slightly modified to “fit” the needs of the potential customer. We’ve already monitored some online chatter from other design firms and agencies noting that their work is appearing on the site for illegal resale. More than a few of our firm’s identity work appear on this site as well.

For example – some screen shots of samples taken directly from the LogoGarden website compared to our original icons:

They say great minds think alike, but here it seems more likely that great crooks steal great work.

These logos were merely re-purposed and are obviously in violation of copyright law. Any money a business owner saves on purchasing a logo from this site will certainly be outweighed by the cease and desist order they are likely to receive.

We here at Prejean Creative are all about economics. Times are tough. If a business owner wants to spend $5 or $50 on an identity, then so be it. We have no problem with that. What we do have a problem with is copyright infringement, unethical business practices, piracy and the outright theft of intellectual property.

There’s the old saying, “You get what you pay for.” And for $79.00 there will be quite a few start-up businesses who will soon pay dearly.

Special thanks to Von Glitschka for the original tweet that alerted Brent.

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9 Responses to DIY, Crowd Sourcing or Piracy – You be the Judge

  1. Kmccarten@comcast.net' KMcCarten says:

    Please tell me you’re going after them… at least with a cease and desist letter?!

  2. gary@prejeancreative.com' admin says:

    KM,

    Thank you for commenting.

    Our clients (who technically are in ownership of the copyright, trademarks or intellectual property) are currently being notified. Ultimately, it will be up to their legal teams to decide upon a course of action.

    There are many other ad agencies, design studios and clients involved in this, and we have it on good authority that everyone is taking the appropriate steps that will shut this site down.

  3. chris@creativebeard.com' Chris Taylor says:

    I hope the design community shares, or rather SHOUTS the outcome of their and/or their client’s legal actions against LogoGarden and the businesses who used them. We need to scare like minded plunderers away from similar ideas, but more importantly we need businesses to understand the risk they take with using sites like this. After all, the only way to make these unethical sites go away is to educate and convince “the market” not to use them. I have never seen this many stolen identities in one place and I really hope this will be the flagship that helps brings down this awful plague . . . I know that’s optimistic thinking but if we abandon that then they’ve already won and have stolen our profession away from us along with our logos.

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  5. chris@creativebeard.com' Chris Taylor says:

    Here’s a link to Paypal’s Infringement Report. If you’ve been affected by John Williams or LogoGarden, fill this out and cut off a vital resource for his ability to collect money to finance his illegal operation(s). https://cms.paypal.com/cms_content/US/en_US/files/ua/infringementreport.pdf

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