Clothundrum (n)

When a person that orders witty, nerdy, and humorous t-shirts on the internet, enough to make them the “funny t-shirt guy” in their hometown, needs to travel to a function that will include other people that order witty, nerdy, and humorous t-shirts on the internet and is having trouble packing. See also: conundrum, clothing.

This has happened to me more times than I care to imagine. I don’t even know how many times I’ve spent the night before I leave for a conference leafing thru my closet trying to pick the most choice tees that hopefully nobody else would rock. I even go so far as to carry a spare shirt in my laptop bag in case somebody shows up wearing the same shirt. Too much? Maybe. I’m just weird like that tho…

I had no clue that this had happened, but one of my coworkers dropped me video of a Preshrunk mention on G4′s Attack Of The Show last week. Wondering why I didn’t happen to catch a referrer from them, I checked their blog and noticed that they dropped the wrong link into their show notes. Whatever. I’m just happy to get my hands on this and share it with y’all…

There's an interesting situation playing out at Threadless — I think this may be the first time a stolen design made it through voting and so on, onto cotton, without being spotted. Here’s the design, supposedly by someone called ‘rocketrobyn’:

And here’s the (apparently original) stencil art by miso and ghostpatrol:

BTW, note the perspective being copied from the photo’s odd angle, to the shirt design…

The Threadless design’s submission page has some classic comments:

• Boney_King_of_Nowhere: Wow. Are you by any chance a fan of Bansky? Because this is almost a rip off. Almost. Awsome though.
• rocketrobyn (this is my design): Thank you for the positive comments. I really like this shirt too! […] I’m not sure who Bansky [jm:sic] is, but I’ll check it out!

Heh.

I heard about this via You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice, a street-design plagiarism blog, where ghostpatrol (one of the stencil artists) posted a blog post about the situation. In the comments there, Jake from Threadless pipes up:

jake n on 12 Dec 2006 at 4:30 am

hey, jake here from threadless. i was just made aware of this situation and want to give you all my assurance that we will handle this properly.

the designer will not be paid and the design will either be removed or licensed from the original designer if they are willing.

give us a couple days to sort the details.

Not to appear whingy, 2 hours later “n.” posts:

The original owners are not willing to license this design to Threadless, and want it removed from the site. Neither artist has yet been contacted by Threadless.

Bit of patience there ;)

More links:

• StencilRevolution forum thread, pretty much down due to load
• Threadless blog thread: ‘So it’s stolen… but can we keep the design?’: ‘I personally really like the design, and feel it should stay within the ranking of Threadless shirts. It would be a shame to see it on the retired page just because someone was a thief.’
• Another blog thread: ‘I want it now that it’s a rarity!’: uh, no.
• ‘i will not be purchasing this. and am reconsidering anymore purchases from this website’, OH TEH DRAMA
• Lots more Threadless blog reactions

It’s an interesting situation, and so far Threadless is handling it very well as far as I can see — the only people who aren’t are some other graf and stencil artists in the reaction threads, vituperating about Threadless not using psychic powers to detect plagiarism:

i tell you, you aren’t printing any of my subs, i know it as they score way too low to get noticed. but on the off chance that someone rips off a design i’ve done, as blatantly as this…i would definitely seek reparations from threadless and the offending subber. do a background check with the subbers available websites etc.

Background checks?! wtf.

Good reaction from miso though:

Once again, we own automatic copyright on these images,…

To clarify — we are not blaming Threadless. They didn’t take the design knowing that it was stolen [if they had done so witch such knowledge, we would be approaching this very differently].

This is the fault of the “designer”, and hopefully this will sort itself out in the next few days. [Who, by the way, has claimed to have done these designs — “This is a t-shirt I designed for Threadless.”]

As yet, either GP nor I have yet been contacted by either the company or “designer” to fix this, but Jake from Threadless has left a very nice comment for us on “You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice”.

The Threadless blog reactions are worth watching if you want to follow the ongoing drama.