Why Is This Artist Trying to Anger Disney’s Feared Lawyers? It’s All Part of a Delightfully Devious Scheme to Stop Internet Scammers

You can set your watch by artists’ and designers’ legal complaints against corporations big and small that, they allege, have stolen their designs (to say
nothing of creators accusing other artists of stealing their work,
but that’s another story). Artists have typically sought damages;
the cases generally settle out of court.

Now, two artists and their Twitter followers have come up with a
more crafty way to strike back at companies that, they say, have
used bots and algorithms to misappropriate images in artists’ viral
tweets, turning them into clothing. The bots often watch out for
messages like “I would love to see this on a T-shirt,” and then,
according to some artists, turn them into T-shirts
that are then sold by companies like TeeChipOfficial and
Teeshirtpublic.

The battle began earlier this month, when Twitter user Hannah Douken posted an image that was meant to trick
such companies into confessing their own sins, proclaiming, “This
site sells STOLEN artwork, do NOT buy from them”:

When Hans-Jürgen Eisenbeis, an artist who lives in
the Berlin area, saw her tweet, he had an idea for a devious scheme
to bait companies into creating an even more damning product:

Knowing that Disney is highly protective of its properties,
Eisenbeis drew Mickey Mouse copping to body odor; in a speech
bubble, the beloved rodent says “We committed copyright
infringement and want to be sued by Disney.” The choice of a Disney
character was doubly apropos, given the entertainment giant’s
repeated extensions of its copyright on the character’s image,
which some lawyers argue goes against the spirit of
copyright law.

Douken and Eisenbeis’s tweets caught on, with other users
retweeting their tweets, saying they want to see their designs on a
T-shirt. Sure enough, by December 4, Eisenbeis would post the
rudimentary cartoon image on a T-shirt on offer from the company
Moteefe, listed at just under €17.

Douken, the originator, did not reply to a Twitter message
seeking comment.

But Eisenbeis did. “To be quite honest, it first started for me
as part of a game,” he said in an email to Artnet News. “People
found out how those annoying theft bots react and act, and everyone
created designs [to] expose all shirt shops profiting from art
theft. But I kinda approached it from a different angle and wanted
to see if their automatic system also detects easy shapes like
Mickey Mouse. I was really not expecting bots to look right past
the ‘copyright infringement’ and just steal my design without any
filters.”

But while the subversive campaign was fun, he said, the issue is
not funny.

“It’s a huge issue with independent artists, who want to gain a
following and also sell their own merch. Art theft hinders them to
grow and potentially also cuts their income. So I’m happy we can
celebrate a tiny victory against one of the art theft
mechanisms.”

The post Why Is This Artist Trying to Anger Disney’s Feared
Lawyers? It’s All Part of a Delightfully Devious Scheme to Stop
Internet Scammers appeared first on artnet News.