Warwick Levy, founder of Lonely Kids Club, on the reality of enforcing IP as a small Australian label.
I started Lonely Kids Club in Sydney in 2011. We work with independent artists, print every order ourselves and have spent 15 years building up a catalogue of original designs.
At the start of this year we began finding copies of those designs being sold across a major online marketplace.
At first it looked like a handful. Then we kept looking.
There were copies of work by multiple artists we collaborate with, including Bridget Farmer's Red Tailed Black Cockatoos, Yellow Tailed Black Cockatoos and Spotted Pardalotes designs. Our Get In The Van Tee by Claire Harrison was another one they seemed to particularly love, and our K Is For Kangaroo Tee kept reappearing alongside those and the bird designs.
Pretty quickly it became impossible to count properly. There were well over 100 copied products that we could identify, and once duplicate listings from different sellers were included it was closer to 1000 plus.
The obvious response was to report them. That turned out to be much harder than it sounds.
Before I worked out the reporting workaround, I also tried emailing them directly several times and never received a reply. I eventually gave up on that route entirely, and still haven't heard back.
The copyright reporting form would repeatedly close itself as we got close to submitting it, or if we left the tab. The first few times it happened I genuinely thought I was doing something wrong.
The limits on the form also made very little sense. You could include a huge number of URLs, but only upload five supporting images, and you would not necessarily know you had hit a limit until after doing the work.
After enough failed attempts I worked out a system that was ridiculous, but worked.
I would open the reporting form in an incognito browser window and keep the actual form visible on screen the entire time. Even switching away from it could make it close or reset. I would have a separate document open alongside it with every piece of relevant information, so I could copy and paste everything across as quickly as possible before the form disappeared again.
I also stopped trying to report huge batches. Smaller submissions were more reliable.
The biggest change was focusing less on explaining every copied artwork individually and more on the fact that sellers were using the Lonely Kids Club name in their listings. That gave us a clearer trademark issue and the reports started moving much faster.
It still took hours and hours of resubmitting forms, tracking listings and starting again whenever something failed.
What frustrated me most was the imbalance. We are a small independent business. The artists involved are independent illustrators and designers. The sellers could upload copies at huge scale in minutes, while removing them required us to spend our own time proving that our work was ours.
One of our artists, Kirsty McIntyre, started helping us by flagging copied LKC work she found. She was often able to get individual listings removed by the following morning, but there were always more to work through.
Eventually we got the overwhelming majority removed.
Most of them have stayed down. Our artists still spot copies every now and then, but it is now a much smaller problem than it was at the start of the year.
The strangest part came later.
After we had spent all that time trying to remove copies of our work, the same marketplace's marketing team began emailing Lonely Kids Club asking us to join its influencer program.
They followed up repeatedly and offered paid collaborations worth up to A$3000 per round.
There was something fairly surreal about being asked to promote a platform we had just spent hours fighting to stop selling our designs.
The whole experience showed me how much of the enforcement burden still falls on small brands and artists. It is not enough for a platform to technically have a reporting system if using it is so difficult that people give up halfway through.
For a small label, every hour spent documenting and reporting copied work is an hour not spent designing, printing, packing orders or actually running the business.
We eventually worked out how to navigate it, but it should never have taken that much trial and error in the first place.