Seriously?

3 Comments to “Seriously?”

1. Ross Kimbarovsky says:

   July 14, 2010 at 1:22 pm

   Steve,

   This is not a record that makes anyone proud. The entry – submitted in the project just this morning – violated our user agreement and standards of conduct for creatives. The designer has permanently lost their right to work on crowdSPRING and their entries in ALL projects have been removed.

   Our apologies to you for the inconvenience of having to bring this to our attention.

   Ross Kimbarovsky
   co-Founder
   http://www.crowdspring.com

   Reply
2. Steve Douglas says:

   July 14, 2010 at 5:10 pm

   @Ross – Thanks for dropping by and commenting. In all fairness to you and Crowdspring, I should probably point out that this is the first time we’ve been aware of our work serving as the ‘inspiration’ for an entry into a contest on your site (not so much with some other folks).

   To be honest, I didn’t want to bag on CS (especially afer the NPR piece from yesterday) but it was brought to my attention, via Twitter, by someone who had read our earlier post from this morning about the same design showing up on 99designs within the same 24 hour period. I thought it illustrated my ongoing concern about copyright infringement and ‘over-inspiration’ in design contests, especially when bookended with that post.

   As you and I have discussed on numerous occasions, I’ve been of the opinion (and remain so) that this is a flaw in the ‘crowdsourcing’ business model, and regardless of how many check boxes participating designers have to toggle, will remain so, simply because there’s nothing to lose, and a couple of hundred bucks to gain, for what amounts to a couple of minutes of Illustrator editing. As I’ve written elsewhere, the boat logo in question isn’t being used so often because it’s a great logo, it’s being knocked off with frightening frequency because it’s the first thing that pops up in Google when people search for “boat + logo.” This is obviously a regularly used technique for people entering crowdsourced contests to find their ‘inspiration’ and I also think it’s quite reasonable to extrapolate that with “duck + logo”, “car + logo”, etc.

   Having said that, and FWIW, I think your policy of banning infringing designers, and removing their other entries from other contests is a sound one for both honest designers and buyers. On other platforms, serial copy cats are allowed to continue entering contests, often after some form of ‘suspension’, something I don’t think is terribly effective in quelling what is obviously a major problem.

   Reply
3. The Week In Freelance: July 23rd - The Freelance Rant says:

   July 23, 2010 at 4:01 pm

   [...] get ripped off due to the ease of a Google image search. And if you are one of those who does this, be aware you might get caught.Dumb Little Man: Yes, freelancers suffer from poverty at times in their careers but being time poor [...]

   Reply