Plagiarism is becoming a big problem of late particularly with the rise of websites like Temu. I've seen several of my crochet designer friends suffer at the hands of the design scammers recently and it's just so awful and incredibly hard to resolve when the scammers are located in all sorts of different countries and find all sorts of international loop holes!
I've been fairly lucky over the last 18 years I've been in the design business and only had one incident of plagiarism around 10 years ago that I had to deal with down the legal route. The needlecraft designer (and crochet designer!) community is generally a friendly, supportive bunch and through my commission work and socials I've 'met' many other talented designers along the way who have the utmost respect for other designers and for want of a better phrase 'stay in their lane'
In this world of increased international scammers and plagiarists though I was surprised and saddened recently to suffer a form of plagiarism much closer to home.....from another UK based cross stitch designer who had copied and pasted several pages of my website into theirs, literally word for word including my copyright page which was very ironic.
They have now removed my wording and claimed to have no idea how large parts of my exact wording had ended up on their website pages (I’ll let you form your own conclusion on that!) I’m glad I’ve been able to pause the legal wheels from turning for now, the legal process can be so time consuming and stressful and things are so busy for me professionally and personally at the moment I really didn’t need this to have to deal with too. It has still left a very bad taste to say the least though and I doubt it is an isolated incident.
Also I just want to say thank you to the people who let me know about these things. I don't generally stalk other designers' websites, too busy minding my own business to concern myself with others, so I've no idea how long this had been going on and may not have even seen it if it wasn't for you!
To end on a positive note (kinda!) one thing I have learnt along the way is that having copycats is a good measure of success! I've gotta try and take something positive from it somehow!