In my case there is really no material damage done, only frustration: after all, I have been giving the files away for free. I’m just annoyed that others are selling my design, additionally using my copyrighted photos.
As for Etsy, I do realize that the majority of people selling there are honest sellers. But while my wording might sound strong, I thought about this several times: Etsy makes money on being a middleman. They should not be able to just ignore intellectual property theft, pretending they have nothing to do with it, while actually making a profit off trading of stolen property. Something here is wrong.
I think the form @Gerry mentioned appeared within the last year or two, I don’t recall being able to do this when I last tried to contact them. But consider: I need go through this (rather detailed and painful) procedure for every seller. And then, even if all this does succeed, all this does is remove those particular listings. The files will come back again, as they already have.
In a more constructive spirit, what I would expect is an easy-to-use “report this listing” button. This would get referred to human moderators who after contacting me once would have all the details (the files, copyrighted photos, proof etc), after which I could click “report this” multiple times and it would go through quickly (as the moderators would have “preapproved” data from me already), without dragging me through a long procedure every time. But this would cost Etsy money, which they are not willing to spend. Hence my “ethically dubious” conclusion.
Protecting digital items is impossible and I understand it is arduous to report these things. But if you don’t try, then less will happen than if you do try.
Ok, I feel really bad about hijacking this thread and I should probably refrain from posting more, but I need to clarify this, because I did try using that link.
The “Report this item to Etsy” link asks you for the reason, and if you select “It uses my intellectual property without permissions” it shows this:
In other words, it’s a blind alley. It just pretends to offer the option. I hope this explains some of my frustration.
That’s the last post I’ll make in this thread — I feel bad about having mentioned the subject, because I really admire Julien’s work (and I intend to follow in his footsteps with similar projects soon).
