Someone Will Probably Try to Steal Your Idea. Here’s What You Need to Know

Copyright (or “intellectual property”) law here in the US is an odd thing. It’s unfair, easily. But then, complete fairness is far too subjective, ambiguous, and expensive to achieve on a grand scale, so the best we’ve got to work with are some hard-and-fast rules.

Copycatting

Fact is, if you have a truly great idea, someone is bound to want to steal it.

Sometimes the culprit is just blindly naive about the whole thing. In this category, I’d place anyone who sees your design as just another DIY challenge on the internet, or the type of blogger who creates “knockoff” tutorials to recreate others’ products. Often, these bloggers and their readers have Etsy shops of their own, where these copied items end up.

Other times said person is knowingly and deceptively trying to channel your work’s success into their own pocket (these are the ones we really, really hate, of course).

In 2011, Urban Outfitters was said to have ripped off an Etsy seller’s bestselling jewelry design. In her rage, the artisan wrote a Tumblr post showing the sameness of the necklaces. It soon went viral and set the handmade community abuzz with fighting words for big retailers like UO. But the Etsy seller never did take legal action, and Urban Outfitters went on selling the item… here’s some reasons why.

Why Fighting Copycats Is So Difficult

Unfortunately, a small creative business dealing with a copycat (especially those of the Urban Outfitters variety, to whom a “Hey, not cool” e-mail is less than effective) has to face 3 hard realities.

• 1. “Useful articles” can be especially difficult to copyright. If one’s art can be worn, or otherwise “used” in any capacity, chances are you’re not going to win a legal battle with a copycat. This is supposed to protect people from monopolizing useful items like chairs or bowls. But it’s also why fashion is incredibly copycat-prone, and how companies have been able to manufacture shoes with the signature Louboutin red outsoles, for example. While a government-approved utility patent is a potential answer to this problem, most patents can take years and whole lotta cash to come through, so it’s usually not a realistic route to go down for every item an artisan creates.
• 2. Legal action is expensive and comes with no true guarantees. Even if you conjure up the resources to sue, there’s a chance you could lose your case. Worse yet, there’s the chance you win and the company doesn’t pay up for damages or stop selling the copied item. While this behavior is incriminating, of course, it requires you to spend even more of your hard-earned money and time fighting for justice. Simply put: even a “win” isn’t a sure thing.
• 3. Your idea may not have been unique, after all. This one can be a little painful– especially if you have been highly praised for a certain creation or identify yourself as an innovator. But outside of technology and medicine, most ideas have already been done in some capacity or another.
  
  Going back to the Urban Outfitters debacle of 2011, shortly after the handmade community became extremely outraged over the injustice that had happened, the author of the Regretsy blog, April Winchell, made a public rebuttal.
  
  While April has always been a strong proponent of copycat-shaming on her blog, she argued that the scorned Etsy seller’s work really wasn’t all that original. She went on to post similar item’s photos dated before the angered seller’s shop even existed, proving the point that perhaps we can be too quick to push the copycat alert button, after all.
  
  In fact, artist Austin Kleon’s book, Steal Like an Artist became a quite quoted book in 2012, praised for its fresh, modern advice for up-and-coming creatives. And one of the book’s most important topics was on “stealing” ideas. From the summary: “Nothing is original, so embrace influence, collect ideas, and remix and re-imagine to discover your own path..” Again, this can come as harsh news to some. But in the right light, it can be quite a freeing thought. After all, how many amateur screenplay writers have sulked around in obscurity because they can’t come up with a completely earth-shattering new plot, or how may creative people have done nothing because they’re insecure their thoughts aren’t ground-breaking enough? Coming to terms with the fact that most of what’s to be done has been done, and that art is a game of remixing, comes up largely positive for society in my opinion.

Piracy

Idea-stealing can also happen in the form of piracy— taking or sharing something without paying for it. Considering that what the person is stealing is valuable for its intellectual property, rather than its physical value.

Products most effected by piracy include music, performance art, and software (including themes, plugins, and apps), although just about any item can potentially be pirated.

You might remember when Pinterest first became popular and a mad flurry of “You’re going to be sued for using Pinterest” notices started popping up across blogs and social media. The concept was that we were pinning (or you might say republishing or yes, even pirating) artists’ and designers’ work without their consent.

Why Fighting Piracy Is Practically Impossible

I have to admit, when I heard about all this opposition to pinning others’ work on Pinterest, I was rather cynical. After all, sharing an artist’s work is akin to doing marketing for them. But people who are overly concerned about pirating often do funny things about it.

You know those websites where right-clicking is disabled? If you try to right-click on an image, you get a popup that says “Copyright Blah Blah Blah.” These used to be more commonplace than they are now, but I do still come across one now and then. And they’re so darn frustrating to use, because you can’t open a product in a new tab or window, like most modern internet users commonly do.

Not to mention, if a visitor is savvy, they know their computer can take a snapshot of their screen at any given time. So they can just save the shot of your site and crop to the desired image if they really, really want to have a copy of it. (Chances are, they don’t.)

Someone who’s overly concerned about piracy needs to come to terms with a few truths.

• 1. There is nothing you can ever do to completely, 100% stop it– from a technical standpoint. As I just illustrated, you may think you’re putting up a clever roadblock, but there’s likely a detour close-by
• 2. If you think you’ve found a clever solution, it’s likely a huge annoyance to potential customers. Like the disabled right-click. To give you another example, I recently released my Etsy Pro Plugin. As I was finalizing the code, it occurred to me that some other plugin creators were using pretty advanced methods to disable certain kinds of piracy. But these methods came at a cost to their users, because there was always some annoying hoop they had to jump through. Or a way in which the plugin’s security system blocked the user from doing something completely harmless, that would have been really useful for them personally.
• 3. Even though piracy is wrong by most people’s standards, our economy can still be forced to shift to make room for it. When society at large is no longer willing to pay $15 for Rhianna’s CD, that’s that. Sure, some of the people who pirated it can be tracked down and punished, as to invoke fear in anyone who’s considering doing the same. But the real issue at play is perceived value. If society no longer sees $15 of value in Rhianna’s CD, it can’t be scared back into them. Rather, the item is actually worth less than it was before. And companies need to get creative as to how they’ll compensate.
  
  Here’s another example that might drive this point home more clearly. A few years ago, I heard there was an uproar among wedding photographers because clients were “distributing” their photos on Facebook. Now, most of us today would think nothing of doing this, right? To a lot of us, a large part of the value we’re paying for when we have beautiful wedding photos taken is the ability to show them off on Facebook! Since this shift in perception was very real and outspread, it was the photography industry that had to grow and change as a result.

So What Does a Person Do About All This?

I was reading a lot of other people’s opinions about intellectual property rights in preparation for this article, and by far the biggest piece of advice I encountered was to try and care less about copycats and pirates.

While I do think a lot of people are overly concerned about these matters or jump to conclusions too quickly (as in the Urban Outfitters story), I’m not completely satisfied by this answer, so I’d like to add to it:

If your idea is certifiably innovative, do look into securing a patent for it.

If you have a video course or a membership site or something of that nature, by all means password protect them! I’m certainly not suggesting you get rid of very basic measures like these.

If someone is legitimately copying you, confront them with an e-mail or ask a friend to do it for you. There’s always a chance that they’re in the naive category, and you will be educating them on proper business behavior. On the other hand, if you confront a business owner and are unable to turn them around, remember that they’re acting as a second-rate version of you, and hold your head up high knowing that you’re a leader and influencer.

Along that line, it recently occurred to me that Instagram (the photo sharing site Facebook purchased for $1 billion) had no official intellectual property when they were sold. And to boot, they had many imitators. It’s just that the Instagram team was very good at what they did and holding their own in the marketplace. I think that’s a lesson we can all take with us as we encounter unfortunate inevitabilities like copycats and pirates.

And, finally, whenever in doubt: slooow, deep breaths. They go a long way. I promise you.

Photo credit: Pascal / Flickr