This is not meant as a shameless plug, because this is a real situation where a lot of my designs, reperesenting countless hours of work, have been hijacked. Here is the situation, bear with me....
As many of you know, I have a website featuring pumpkin carving designs available for download. It's super cheap to join (as low as $2) and it's not really meant to be a money maker. I started it mostly because I enjoyed doing it and I wanted to see more of my designs carved, because I could never do them all myself. The fact that it has been a success really blows me away.
The other day some guy sends me a message asking me to exchange links, he says he is a pumpkin carver and he thought it would be a good link exchange for both of us. His site sells artificial pumpkins with pre-carved designs. He also mentions that he used a few of my designs for his available carvings and he hopes I don't mind. Well I checked out the site, and by "a few" of my designs, he means "almost all" of them. He simply hijacked 2/3 to 3/4 of my designs and put them up on his site as designs that are available for him to carve. But its not only me, it's a few other designers that he is ripping off too. In fact, NONE of the designs he offers to carve were actually designed by him, 100% of his carvings were designed by others.
Well, I told him that I didn't like what he was doing and said that I'd help him out by allowing him to use 10 designs, with a message stating that they were in fact mine and not his. Other designers simply told him no and requested that he remove their patterns from his site. Well, the asshole decided to keep all the designs up on his site. Not only that, he thinks WE are the assholes for not allowing him to do this. Now, I suppose my site doesnt specifically state that my patterns cannot be reused, redistributed or resold, but when I started it I never thought some jackass would be attempting to make money from my hard work.
It gets better... He sent me and another designer a threatening e-mail stating that he will blow the whistle to Disney, Marvel, Lucasarts and all the other companies that have copyrighted charictors, of which we have created carving patterns. If we try to block him from using our patterns, he'll try to shut us down. This is a real threat because 2 other pumpkin pattern sites were shut down or severely crippled by this exact thing.
This whole thing has literally given me a headache and a pain in the neck. If we fight for what is right, we face the reality that we'll have to remove 80% of our designs. At least we have the talent and ability to create 100% original patterns, our sites will survive, but would be crippled. On the other hand, it's doubtful that this guy will seriously impact our business because he's not actually reselling the patterns, just using them in a way they were not intended.
I'll list the sites involved here so you can see the blatent theft for yourself, if mods see fit to delete these, then go ahead and accept my apologies
My site:
www.jamminpumpkins.com (most of the designs are in the members section, but you can read the list of titles to compare)
The ripoff artist's site
www.creepycarvings.com (currently down as he makes "changes")
Zombie Pumpkins:
www.zombiepumpkins.com (another designer who is being ripped off, and whom I have an enormous amount of respect for)
Anyone have any advise?