Only a little to do with glowforge and just curious

So I know this isn’t really a glowforge thing hopefully I’m not breaking any rules but I was browsing Etsy just trying to get some idea motivations not copy just in general looking around.

Anyway I can’t believe the volume of definitive copyrighted stuff on there. I mean the shear volume amazed me. Found pages where people had Disney sponge bob, baby Yoda and on and on all of it a direct copy paste all of it named just a tiny bit different maybe named sponge joe but it’s sponge bob to the world.

Anyway my question is how in the world are they getting away with it and how is Etsy allowing it? I could see someone starts a shop sells a few things and then moves on makes a new shop or something but I saw one with 15,000 sales all over the board no way they got permission for everything I just don’t believe it.

I’m not looking to do it it’s just a curious thing is all have these companies just given up on policing or is it just not worth it to them?

I know nobody knows a concrete answer more of just a discussion thing I guess but I know a lot of you have been around way longer than me I just find it amazing is all.

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It’s impossible for Etsy’s moderation team of a few hundred people at most to police every listing created by all 4.4 million active sellers (and tens of thousands new ones every day).

In addition to that, the way copyright law works in the US (and most copyright treaty participants globally), they have an incentive not to look.

Specifically, section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act says that Etsy cannot be sued for copyright infringement committed by their users so long as they don’t have actual knowledge of the infringement and expeditiously respond to requests to take down infringement from rightsholders.

If they don’t go looking for it, they can’t have actual knowledge of it, so they’re safe.

When some craft seller starts impinging on Disney’s merch revenue, like when Baby Yoda stuff hit stores, they have a law firm go through Etsy and other marketplaces and issue mass takedown requests to have those listings pulled down. Etsy does so, and if a single store gets multiple takedowns like that, Etsy eventually closes their store. So it’s up to each rightsholder to do the policing.

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There are so may people violating copyright in a sea of other people, so the ‘odds’ are they will never be caught, or if they are caught, they are given a wrist slap.
by saying ‘magical princess’ instead of ‘Disney princess’ a fast search won’t discover them.
and since they are not ‘major companies’ Disney can’t make money off them with fines
so Disney lawyers go after bigger fish… I may be wrong on this, but this is what I think.

Jonathan

PS: there are DOZENS of sites on etsy selling stolen .svg files from our own site, as fast as we take one down, another one pops up.

Interesting always figured Disney or whatever fill in the company would make examples of people but you guys are probably right.

I also figured with new algorithms it would be much easier to find. For instance I have a program to look for multiple “close” pictures on my backup hard drives it’s so simple to use I can choose how close I want the pictures to be it doesn’t look like the old searches for file names or identical files sizes but the actual photos. It’s pretty slick so if I have 30 photos of the dogs that I snapped off in fairly rapid succession or even on different days it will find all the photos that have that particular dog then compare see if they are close depending on close I want them to be. Bought it cause I had made the mistake over the years of just backing up my drive then forgetting what photos I had added and just backing up the entire thing again then forgot which backup drive was newest so backed up that heheh. Needless to say after 20 years of doing that I had a hell of a mess.

Anyway point being figured if i could do that with a cheep little program a place like Disney could find every much mouse in 10 seconds or less. But the fact they are small fries probably makes having the lawyer write out the letter at 200 bucks an hour not worth it.

Thanks just find it all interesting. And yah all the svg files blows my mind so many are so insanely simple makes me think making the files and product like I’ve been doing a bad move should just sell the file lol. But then I like making the stuff

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I could clean a major chunk of hard drive space to do that :exploding_head:

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I’ve heard horror stories about Disney even taking the equipment you produced the stuff on. They do have opportunities to buy usage rights from them, some big Japanese stores I know have bought them and use Disney legally on their merchandise.

But I don’t think the etsy shops I’ve seen have gotten licensing rights. I remember seeing one with Nintendo, anime, Disney, Harry Potter, etc etc. Hundreds of items from every imaginable license with thousands of sales. Probably the people who really want to buy that stuff wouldn’t be the one reporting them.

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I did a bunch of work for them and I was forbidden to even take working drawings to show my work to other potential employers.

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I had an old Girlfriend who worked for Disney she called it “Mouseshwitz”

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