As If I Didn’t Have Enough On My Plate Already (Part 2)

I am back with Part 2 of, “As If I Didn’t Have Enough On My Plate Already”, where I discuss how unsavory people lie, cheat and steal to the detriment of my business and my companies. In part 2, I focus on Quicktion who digitally prints designs in India that he has no right to be selling whatsoever.

A few weekends ago, I was just enjoying my day when my phone started blowing up. Ugh, what now? Can’t I just have a peaceful weekend?

It turned out that for some reason a lot of customers and consumers learned about Quicktion the thief this weekend. I started receiving lots of screenshots of items being sold by Quicktion on Ebay. As I looked over what Quicktion was selling, it didn’t take a genius to realize that this was the work of a serial copyright infringer who didn’t care about consequences whatsoever.

Aside from him selling loads of unauthorized Tula Pink fabric designs, he’s offering licensed fabrics that I am confident he has zero right to be printing….think Disney, Harley Davidson, Dunkin Donuts, Ford, Sponge Bob, NFL teams, NCAA teams and the list goes on. Heads up to those companies that hold these licenses.

One of the most frustrating things to me is the lack of respect for copyright in other countries. Again, this is just a total waste of my time and money! What’s also frustrating is that it is really hard to even get Ebay to take these sort of offers down without having to jump through lots of hoops. It’s sad to know that Ebay doesn’t do sufficient due diligence to check the authenticity of all of its sellers. Even worse, when I look at the negative reviews for the seller, Ebay doesn’t do anything about that either as long as they get their cut. You would think that they would care about their customers being duped, but their motto is probably, “Buyer beware.” Below are the negative reviews this seller has.

• I am trying to return the item, but can’t.
• It’s not clear. Like copying a photo onto fabric. (Duh! That’s what it is!)
• A major blurry digital disappointment.
• Garbage, blurry. COUNTERFEIT. Hello Kitty from India took 3 months.
• Fake. Terrible attempt to make it look like the real thing. Don’t waste your $.
• Bad. Bad terrible! Do not order from this seller!!!! Do not order!! Do not!!
• Canceled order immediately, 2 days later seller said not possible, it already shipped.
• Did not receive. No communication at all from seller. No replies to inquiries.

It’s really quite disgusting to me that people can hide their identity and continue to perpetrate crimes of this nature without consequences. It’s even more frustrating that our publicly-traded American companies like Ebay, Facebook, Amazon, etc. are not doing much about it either.

I have been spending a lot of time fighting this lately with my lawyers, but unfortunately, this is like whack-a-mole whereby after you hit the mole on the head, 3 more show up. We had a bunch of success getting Amazon items removed that misappropriated Kaffe Fassett’s name, products and his designs. The killer is that I have to waste my money doing this with little to no recourse against the seller who inevitably is in China or India or somewhere that lacks respect for copyright law. At least if an American company is in violation, we can try to go after them legally and try to obtain a legal settlement as we have done in the past. That is a little more gratifying, but a waste of time and very frustrating nonetheless.

These are definitely sad circumstances and I hope our government and all the companies whose copyrights are being infringed upon have a lot more time, money and lawyers on staff to fight this fight. In the end, all buyers need to beware and make sure they are getting the real thing and not a crappy counterfeit copy. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

P.S. To bring you up to date, my lawyers got Ebay to take down all the fakes by Tula Pink that Quicktion was trying to illegally sell.

I hadn’t planned a part 3 to this post, but next week I am going to share the story behind the recently posted photo of Kaffe Fassett fabric copies being destroyed by fire.