Hoodie Time Art Theft - With Resolution!

Today I bring you another exciting story of art theft, well, okay... maybe not too exciting. It is just another run of the mill company stealing artist work and slapping it on products to make a quick buck before they are caught. In this case, as far as I can tell, they were caught rather quickly. This came to my attention yesterday, Thursday August 30th, when artist were posting about a theft site. Looks like I was but one of the lucky artist getting ripped off by Hoodie Time. Yes, I know the link it broken and that is the good news. An personal piece from 2010 was getting slapped on shirts, hoodies, tank tops, etc and since I have never posted anything online that is even remotely print quality I am sure that the product would have been A-MAZE-ZING. Let's have a look at the shirt...

I love how they mark it as a designed hoodie.

Stealing art is does not make you a designer.

The funniest thing, and I wish I had gotten a screen shot of it, was that there was a link at the bottom of each page allowing you to report art thief. There was an email address to send your complaints to. They requested you send the link to the offending product and then links that prove the art is yours. They had a statement along the lines of, "Artist lie about owning the art they submit to us". This is a paraphrase at best, but it is what the intent of the statement. Oh look! The stolen art clothes are even on sale...

So tempting... My stolen art is on sale. Maybe I should order a couple.

(The answer is always NO, by the way.)

Looking at these samples I can not imagine that these would print the way they are depicted. and if they did would not look 'right'. Is the image repeated on the back? Who knows... and we will never know because the entire site is down. I sent in a request to have my stolen work taken down, but by mid afternoon the entire site was offline. A happy ending is always good. A happier ending is that they made no money before their site was taken down. Oh look, a confusing hoodie... are the arms fused to the body?

Just what every kid wants... a Great Old One hoodie...

Since the site is down and it all seems to be taken care of, I will leave you with the original art that was stolen by Hoodie Time. Not sure if this means this is a good piece of work or that it is incredibly mediocre and therefor able to be sold to the masses. Either way, I have always like this piece...

Great Old One

12.8 x 12.5 - Digital

© 2010 Christopher Burdett

That is all for another exciting week on the blog, see you back here next week! Until then...

For more samples of my work or to contact me regarding my availability head over to my website: www.christopherburdett.com