Alright. You know I like Ohio Valley Style Pizza. You know I draw mazes. You know I sell mazes on stuff. I also occasionally dabble in other bad art & design work. One of those examples is my Ohio Valley Style Pizza T-shirt/sticker/whatever they wanna print it on at TeePublic & RedBubble. These people are worse than the people who make the PiTtsburGH StYLe pIzza is jUsT lunChABleS joke about Beto’s and DiCarlo’s.
Apparently, that caught the attention of art thieves around the world wide web. I used the Goog for trying to locate my Ohio Valley style T-shirt, and three from Printerval popped up… my art, but not my storefronts or name attached to them. Who TF is Printerval? This is maybe worse than the last time my art was stolen and the guy reached out afterward mad about me naming & shaming him. That’s some world-class jagoffery.
Three different dingleberries used my art in a store… or one scraping bot did? Who knows what triggered them? The maddening part of these ones was that they were offering to add a licensed design file for $2.99. I think I make about $2.50 on a T-shirt sale at TeePublic or RedBubble, even less on stuff like stickers or buttons. I don’t know off the top of my head because I don’t sell them often. 😂
I’m absolutely not complaining about that. I really don’t push the links, this is for fun, I’m not making a living off of it, & the stuff I do offer is weird and very niche. But all that being said, it’s still my art and any profit from sales should go to me after TP & RB take their massive cuts in exchange for doing all the work.
If SakuraArt, Mindyguw, & Kemarsporat2zl actually exist, they can all kiss my ass. Are people doing this, or is it all scripts & bots? I’m guessing even if I watermarked it, that could be easily removed… and paying to copyright an image that doesn’t sell seems to be a negative sum game.
If people worked as hard at creating as they do stealing, they might actually make better art than I do.
Oh yeah, the site said that there were currently 8 in carts. I hope that’s a sales pressure tactic and not real. I don’t think I have sold 8 T-shirts total. 🤣
I follow artist Ryan Conners (KilkennyCat Art) on Threads. She has dealt with art theft for quite some time. Sometimes it’s direct. Sometimes the art is changed. Sometimes it’s scrapers. Sometimes it’s actual damn physical stores. Check out her incredible cat art! I reached out for advice and she suggested the DMCA‘s to the websites & to follow-up with Cloudflare.
At any rate, I had Claude.ai help me draft a DMCA and look for more. It found one on ClickOneShirt where I was unsuccessful in finding any more myself. This one was unhinged in that it contained this copypasta-ish word salad that can only be an LLM-fueled fever dream:
It was a sweltering summer afternoon, the kind where the air hung thick enough to feel like you could almost drink it, and the thought of anything remotely warm made me want to crawl back into bed. But my stomach was rumbling something fierce, and the memory of my Grandma Betty’s cookouts, specifically her version of Rawdog the cheese and toppings Ohio Valley style shirt, danced in my head. It wasn’t really about the shirt, of course, but the meal that went along with it. Back then, we used to pile into her dusty station wagon and head over to the local butcher shop in anticipation.
ClickOneShirt.com
Rawdog the cheese and toppings Ohio Valley style shirt: buy and enjoy this shirt
The butcher, a man named Mr. Henderson with a walrus mustache and perpetually stained apron, always greeted us with a hearty laugh. He knew Grandma Betty’s order by ass: thick-cut, juicy Italian sausages and an assortment of cheeses, the good stuff that melted like a dream. She was a stickler for quality, and the toppings were just as important. Onions, peppers, a jar of Mrs. Renfro’s ghost pepper salsa (that stuff burned, but man, was it good), and always, always, a mountain of shredded cheddar.
Back home, the process was almost a ritual. The sausages would sizzle on the grill, the smell alone enough to make your mouth water. Grandma, meanwhile, would be expertly slicing the hot dog buns, the kind with the squared ends. The real magic happened when the sausages were split and the cheese went in; it would bubble and blister like something out of a cartoon, just oozing perfection.
Like. What? Seeing the words Grandma and Rawdog in the same sentence is unsettling to say the least. It doesn’t even make any sense. Why has this backstory been invented? More importantly: Did it work to sell T-shirts and should I add it to my listing?
This is some J. Peterman level shit. Is Eddie Sherman working at ClickOneShirt?
Bonkers, I tell you. Bonkers.
“He knew Grandma Betty’s order by ass: thick-cut, juicy Italian sausages and an assortment of cheeses…” WHAT?
Also, I reached out with a Google report tool to get the fraudulent art removed from their search listings. Who knows if any of it will pan out, but at least I can say I exhausted every avenue that I had available.
-🍕-
So, if you’re following this absolute shenanigans of the highest order, this may help:
The Original:
- TeePublic listing
- RedBubble listing
- The original post where this whole thing started (Nov 4, 2024)
The Thieves:
- Printerval listing #1
- Printerval listing #2
- Printerval listing #3
- Clickoneshirt listing complete with a fake AI-generated “Grandma Betty” backstory.
Where I Reported It:
- Printerval’s DMCA policy
- Clickoneshirt’s DMCA policy
- Cloudflare’s abuse/DMCA form (both sites run behind Cloudflare)
- Google’s copyright removal tool for getting the listings out of search results
- Google’s general legal removal request hub
If This Sounds Familiar…
Same shit happened with my maze designs:
I hope to have a follow-up saying how quick and cooperative everyone was, but… we’ll see I guess, won’t we? I know where I am going to get a celebratory slice or two.
I guess I should have mentioned that you should buy a T-shirt or some stickers or a maze book from my various stores. It’s better than Grandma Betty using what should be my profits to rawdog Mr. Henderson the butcher.
