Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

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> make a cool printed design on a game boy shell? quickly stolen, mass produced on aliexpress

I work in this space and can provide a little correction/illumination:

The folks selling printed phone cases, gameboy cases, etc are generally not shipping these over from aliexpress. They are almost all printed on demand from printers local to the country of the buyer (there's a half dozen big phone case printers just in the US). Nothing is mass produced except the blanks.

The sellers come up with the artwork and titles/tags/descriptions/etc. Software like mine creates the Etsy listings and processes orders, routing to appropriate printers which ship directly to the customer. Etsy provides an API for this.

Print-on-demand sellers are selling pure intellectual property. They jealously guard their high-resolution images, but that doesn't stop the industry from having a big ripoff problem. Low-effort ripoffs copy a public low-res image, which makes a terrible print but potential customers/victims might not be able to tell from an online mockup image. High-effort ripoffs involve hiring an artist to make a new work substantially (or identically) similar to something else. Both cheat the intellectual property of the original artist, but they're using the same print companies.

Whether this stuff is "handcrafted" is somewhat ambiguous - is a book handcrafted? Is a set of patterns for a dress or a piece of furniture handcrafted? Something 3d printed? Certainly someone came up with the artwork "by hand", but printing it on a tshirt or phone case is pretty mechanical.

Another grey area with POD (print-on-demand) is creating designs for POD products e.g. products like t-shirts, tote bags, mugs, wall prints, etc.

There are hundreds of online tutorials promising you how to create designs for sale on Etsy - even if you have not a shred of design talent. How? Go to Canva, find a good-looking template and slap on it on as many POD products as possible. Etsy is simply overstuffed with products like this. Many of these sellers are probably making good sales. Does this count as something being 'designed'? Does it even matter?

The perception that Etsy is a marketplace mostly of artists and "makers" is one that hasn't been true for a while.

That's true but I think this is a relatively small part of the POD market. Some POD marketplaces (not Etsy, but Redbubble and TeePublic) detect stock content and automatically ban accounts.

Etsy tends to attract the more sophisticated POD merchants because it's more complicated (separate printer required) and there's a $0.20 listing fee so there's more upfront cost. Most successful POD merchants have thousands or tens of thousands of designs, so the listing fees really add up.

The most successful POD merchants have small design teams that produce content every day. That may or may not fit your mental image of an Etsy seller. But the low-effort non-artists who took a guru's "make money fast in POD" online course tend to do very poorly, and don't make up the bulk of Etsy.

> Print-on-demand sellers are selling pure intellectual property.

Well they're selling properly licensed products that use their images that are protected by copyright (and potentially trademark).

The supposedly appropriate response would be to have the ability to sue those that rip them off in exactly the same way that Nike or Chanel or any other manufacturer would.

There may be some liability to the print companies (and perhaps the other companies in the pipeline) for producing product that doesn't have a properly validated copyright on the image. Especially if they are producing in bulk/for general sale to the public.

So it should be in Etsy's interest (and yours, and the print companies) to ensure that what a seller is asking you to produce is not ripped off.

There absolutely is a legal risk to print companies and marketplaces for assisting in intellectual property theft. In practice this means we look out for major trademarks, and ripoffs of small players are impossible to police.

There is no such thing as "validated copyright" - you own a copyright on the content you produce and there's no official registrar. Determining ownership is an adversarial process - everyone says "this is mine, the other guy ripped me off". Small players don't have the legal resources to prosecute.

Services like mine which manage whole libraries can pretty easily weed out the bad players because they tend to be full of TM violations. But the marketplaces have it more difficult.

Nobody has come up with a good solution to this yet.

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