Sopien

Guys, I'm sure mike is gonna read this, so if you have any words of encouragement please don't be shy!

Yo Selvin, completely support you and Mike and anyone else being fucked over by poor "designers" with no integrity or morales on spec sites.

I have made a post on my site with a link to this :)

@Euan: Awesome, your support is appreciated my friend!

Selvin, my opinions on spec work and CrowdSpring-esque businesses are no secret to anyone who knows me. There's a sickening tug in my gut every time I see these stories about poor or fraudulent 'design' being fenced as 'quality' or 'original' artwork. If CrowdSpring is going to continue allow blatant theft and dishonesty among it's members, then they must be held legally accountable. It's no different than stolen goods being sold on ebay.

If you or Mike need any help, or exposure, you can count on me.

@Sandoer I agree with you 100%, thank you very much for the support!

Great work Selvin. Thanks for exposing one of the many flaws. The fact that they ignor banning a known thief, speaks volumes about the business.

There are examples of other submissions that actually win Crowdspring projects. Take this winner of a $200 logo design project http://tinyurl.com/mhbcl7 looks very similar to many of the cliparts here http://tinyurl.com/m4yqbq

Crowdspring and all the other Spec and Crowdsourcing sites are just encouraging plagiarism, unfortunately the people taking part in this type of "contest" are mostly undertalented or nonqualified designers and they don´t give a shit as long as the dollar$ are rolling in. If I was Mike I would start a copyright /plagiarism lawsuit against both Crowdspring and the "designer" who are both blatantly ripping Mike and his Client off. Let´s hope that more of us can come together and expose these frauds for what they are...

@Mike: You're welcome my friend, I haven't heard from them yet!

@Fed up: I think this case is just one of the many that go unnoticed, I'm sure that if we dug deeper we could find a plethora of similar rip offs. They just don't really care!

@Count Zeero: True words, I myself hope that others can see crowdspring for what it is and join us!

To be honest I think this is all Mike's fault. Mike, itf you weren't so damn good people would need to look a little harder for source material. Oh and just a request, if you wouldn't mind adding your vector files into tyour portfolio - tracing is just too time consuming. ;o)

On a serious note, this kind of behavior is unacceptable. There is a difference between a copy and a rip. A copy would be looking at something and making your own version, but as the overlay shows, this is a direct trace of the original design, and there is nobody in the world that could argue that in this case the logos are just 'similar'. There is no room for any excuse, its straight theft.

I guess i could probably manage to justify 'copying' as long as it has some elment of personal interpretation, BUT the end user should always know about the original - because undoubtedly they will be unhappy to have paid for a brand which looks almost identical to another.

If napster gets sued to hell and back for facilitating theft & infringing on copyright, how can this place get away with it time and time again. I think its only time before they're looking down the barrel of a hefty lawsuit.

I'm not totally positive on this, but I'm 99% sure that crowdSPRING has never actually SOLD anything that was a ripoff. So in my opinion, they've taken fairly good measures to protect their clients. It's unfortunate that they don't block blatant plagiarists, but everyone deserves a second chance in my opinion. I doubt if most people try it again after getting caught once.

I can't stand Croudspring or any other company like them. When that Forbes article came out back in February, I flipped out and went off on Forbes and CS (which you can read about here: http://designbyfirgs.com/blog/2009/02/news-flash-forbes-calls-designers-snooty/)

Mike & Selvin, I don't know either of you, but you have my 100% support!!!

I think it would be a good idea if these crowdsourcing sites took more disciplinary actions against those guilty of plagarism and and design ripping. IMO they should be banned from the contest or competition...it's like other competition, get caught cheating, and your eliminated, period! It is my understanding that the guy that stole Mike Erickson's design "Sidewinder" wasn't banned, and that's just not right!

I'd be a hypocrite if i just said "these crowd sourcing sites suck!" so this is one is going to be a rant of sorts...

I for one was lucky enough to have a glimpse of their advantages...started my whole design career 2 and a half yrs ago when i accidentally stumbled upon 99designs.com (then sitepoint.com) it was a great site where i ended up seeing some amazing designers who actually inspired me to buy coreldraw and photoshop just to learn their craft(an investment of around 600$) which considering the fact that I'm from India is quite a bit for a hobby...

some of the qualities i learnt from 99designs and still find quite admirable:

1. I learnt to think fast as I'd set a target of doing close to 10 designs a day, which is a much higher number than anybody does in any design school, agreed the quality initially might not be up to a professional designers standards...but being quick on your feet is an essential skill set to develop as a designer, this site was an amazing practice ground for that quality where you have to work on say ten contests a day.

2. Some of the top honchos there at that time were really helpful and offered both brickbats and bouquets without prejudice, this actually made me want to be one of them, made me quit my job and take this up as a full time profession.

3. Really helped me keep track of the current design trends and made me update myself on a regular basis on design aesthetics, type treatments, etc.,

Now, the evolution or i should call it the devolution of this model happened primarily because of three reasons :

1. More exposure to these sites through healthy reviews and PR they were generating...

2. More exposure meant more patrons and more designers(so-called)

3. More designers translated to more entries and less scrutiny by the fellow participants (trust me its quite painstaking to go through 200 entries and learn from them!)

4. (I know, i said 3 reasons! but my math sucks!) More designers + More Entries = higher stakes and higher pressure to win. This would actually be a good thing in an idealistic society, but unfortunately we don't live in an idealistic society.

The result - Designs being ripped off from easily accessible sources! Off late the amount of cliparts being ripped from sites like istockphoto and shutterstock is apalling!!

And another completely unexplored angle in this whole crowd sourcing thing is sites like guru, getafreelancer, odesk, getacoder and likes, where the cost of logo designing job is $20!!! and even there the client expects the same quality as our very own Mike! and these slip under the radar as most of the designs are transferred privately through emails and are not open to public eyes! There is a very serious need now more than ever to somehow find a way to standardize this whole freelancing process online...especially when it comes to logos and web designs!

I think as a part of the design community we should start acting now and taking more responsibility on this...tweeting and blogging might only help in creating an awareness of the problem...

I could throw a few ideas in the ring off-hand and we should really look at more options to explore...some kind of decisive action needs to be taken now!

1. Verification of any and every freelance designer online - i know this is an himalayan task to accomplish! but somehow somewhere the initiative has to be made... so why not a website like verisign where you check out the credentials of a designer and give him a seal of approval?? this way every designer who's got certified by this common body [i know this sounds very commie, but hey anything to stop this kind of a free(read flea) market] is a reputed one and can be trusted with[ OK admitted there is going to be problems here too, but c'mon at least its going to put some fear and responsibility in the plagiarism market) ! Its impossible for us to shut these guys down, so lets try and make it hard for them to get away with no responsibility.

2. Have these crowdsourcing guys put up a statutory warning (like they do in a carton of smokes) - 'Authenticity is not a guarantee' or something similar.

3. We have a brilliant tool at hand in form of tineye.com, we should try our best to feed more images into the site and help them index more...imagine we are a 1000+ strong community and if we feed even 10 per head a day, we'd have indexed close to 3,650,000 images a year!

more ideas to come...

Think i would've worn your patience thin with this rant...but enuf sitting on my ass as this whole thing passes by...so really appreciate your patience Selvin for reading this rant and kudos for spearheading this campaign!

Best

John M

@Nathan: No doubt about it, they have to do something about it!

@Jared: In my experience, many people that rip someone else off will not stop even after being caught!

@Jenny: Exactly, there are so many things wrong with crowdspring and crowdsourcing in general but the main issue here is the tolerances towards thieves and plagiarism.

@John: Absolutely brilliant, we can't be one sided when it comes to a subject such as crowdsourcing, we have to be innovative in our thinking and we have to find new ways to go about defending our industry.

Thank you all for sharing your thoughts!

Like John, I started my logo career in spec competitions and I presonally dont have a problem with having spec comp sites, HOWEVER, i believe that it should NEVER be the playground for a pro (or even a decent) designer.

Maybe we (as the design community) should be trawling the spec sites for decent designers and recommending they move on. A website explaining their impact on the community at large would probably be a good place to direct them.

Maybe we can all take the opportunity to create an account, then contact members we feel are a bit 'too good' and suggest they move on.

Getting a flood of notices saying that designers around the world think that they're too good for spec work should be enough to persuade at least some of them.

Just an idea. <->ll go write my own article on it.

No offense to the original designer from Logomotive, but if we are going to talk about taking liberty with someone elses work..... it really seems like the original art has some major inspiration from the AT&T logo. Hmm...where do we draw the line. That is a hard question.

Martyrdom works well too Selvin. Having Mike's work plagiarised can be a blessing for the campaign against spec work. Copyright law exists which alone can provide some protection beyond CrowdSpring but more importantly the reputation of the site, its designers, and therefore its clients are brought into scrutiny. The more misappropriated designs that enter into the spec community, I would like to think, would see sites like CrowdSpring de-evolve to obscurity. But alas this is not my work that has been stolen in this instance but I am sympathetic for Mike's predicament... moving away from the topic is unashamedly Sony's Laface Records artist Pink and her music video rip of Martin Emond's work that some say is "a tribute" to him. This shows how copyright can fail us all. Maybe Mike could see this too as tribute to him?... nah that is just bullshark! (little mermaid rip)

I think this storm against crowd sourcing seems a bit to exaggerated, also all about this that Mike got copied. Its very correct that you take up the issue and by doing so you turn it around and give Mike extra publicity about this.

There is a big difference between rip-off and copy alias "inspiration", everything and exactly everything is created from inspiration of something else. Take for example the fashion industry that's a classic example of what happens when design for the masses becomes reality and where copyrights issues is an everyday subject in a speed of light business of ideas. Now, when we entered the new era of crowd sourcing that's an early offspring to outsourcing, a turbulent storm rises similar to the downloading "torrent" copyright issue....that also is bollocks (but a different subject).

I fully agree with you guys in some terms but please face the fact.
One: someone copy Mike,
Two: an angry mob start blogging about this.
Three: Mike ends up with a higher fame factor and self confides (hopefully some new high rolling clients also).
Meanwhile this poor lad that copied him got only paid (I dunno if he won or not) for the "production-time" that it too to reproduce the logo.

I am also a designer and would rather work in a coffee shop then compete in any form of crowd sourcing with some guys from Kolkata (with all respect, so I don't lose karma points) that can live a year in their country on what I need to survive a month in mine (Sweden). But if anyone would copy my designs I would be so happy that I probably ended up getting hubris.

So... Mike, be happy of the acknowledgment and for the rest of you guys, crowd sourcing is and will always be in the level of the price paid for it.