Image theft on the Amazon Marketplace is a huge deal. Are you a designer selling your artwork or photos on Zazzle and/or Society6? Then it is very likely that your designs have been stolen from mainly Chinese businesses and are sold on Amazon without you getting one cent from it! So far, we do not yet know how these copycats do get our images but it is likely that they only take a screenshot and use this screenshot which will result in very bad printing quality.
On Zazzle, you can add watermarks to your designs which seems to help in most cases, but Society6 does not have watermarks and they do not want to use them in the near future.
In the last few months, many of us have tried to report these copyright infringements to Amazon. Some stolen designs from a store get removed, most won’t be removed since Amazon is not very cooperative and requests more and more proof that this is OUR work we are reporting. Even Zazzle did try to help us by contacting Amazon directly but Zazzle does not hold the rights to our work. Good to know but that’s a bad thing in this case 🙂
And even if a counterfeit product is successfully removed, new products and even sellers pop up almost instantly. It is insane! And when you contact them about what they are doing and that they are stealing your design, they do not even understand the concept of copyright!
So here is a new idea: Did you know that after only one purchase from Amazon.com, you are entitled to review EVERY item listed on their marketplace? Yes, really! Since I am from Germany and have never ordered anything from them I thought I could not review but hey, apparently my free Kindle ebook purchases did count, too. And here is the plan:
Let’s all write very low 1 star reviews on products with our stolen designs. Let’s raise awareness about image theft on Amazon and let’s fight back! All it takes is a comment about the poor printing quality, e.g. like this:
The printing quality will be very bad since the image was stolen! Do NOT buy this item!
And you can rate the other 1 star reviews as helpful 🙂
If you don’t know where to start, please take a look at my Amazon profile where my reviews are all public. I do not only review my own products but also help other designers. Just click through the products, review and rate the other reviews:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/A2101VVWW4OQ28
You can also leave a link to your Amazon profile as a comment or links to stolen artwork on Amazon. I will visit and review them!
Zizzling Zazzle - Christine aka stine1 blogging 
I am also supporting this cause, my profile link is here, will check out yours now http://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/A3413AYCQ34AC7
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Of course 🙂
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Hard to hear but…I asked for deleting my shop at Zazzle days ago. I checked today, many of my designs are still selling by this company. Just a thought – stolen by or just ”shared” without permission of designer by companies like Zazzle, Society etc???
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