While browsing urbandictionary.com (for reasons that aren’t important right now), I saw a banner ad for this t-shirt design:
Ok, that’s pretty funny; I like a good public-signage stick figure joke as much as the next guy, if not more. Being a good netizen, I went ahead and clicked the link to noisebot.com, where the following shirts are also available:
Good times. But mixed in among these gems are some serious clunkers:
and a couple of designs that look really suspiciously familiar:
I know that the internet is a big place, where intellectual property rights go to be dragged screaming into the bushes and forcibly violated, but God damn it, that doesn’t mean I have to suborn laziness. Get your own damned ideas, Noisebot. I kinda wanted to buy some of your stuff, but I don’t feel good about supporting thieves. Or people who make t-shirts out of lolcats, for that matter.
Not that Threadless is all that much better – people steal ideas from each other on that site all the time. But at least Threadless has the excuse that their designs are submitted by the public – Noisebot have turned theft into part of their business plan. I guess the only answer is to steal everyone’s ideas and screen them onto t-shirts for myself.
Yeah, that’s the ethical thing to do.
-ssr