Everything I Know About Artist’s Rights I Learned From Being A Manticore

Theft happens, all to often, in your country, in your city, in your housing development, and sometimes in your home. Theft also occurs in the design community, far too often, and a lot of the time, the thief gets away with it, because no one is looking out. Design is sadly a dog eat dog world, we are often not paid what we’re worth, or someone is willing to do the work cheaper than what we’d like to charge.

Worst of all, are new “designers” who take other peoples work, possibly alter it, and sell it as their own, putting no effort whatsoever into the final product and riding the curtails of the original artist. It’s up to us as artists to watch each other’s backs, to look out for each other and protect our creative assets.

Luckily sites like You Think We Wouldn’t Notice have sprung up, listing offending artists and designs. Sadly, that isn’t enough, all that does is show the offending work. There’s no attack on the offender, nothing to shame him or her into taking down the “work” or retract it.

Recently, that has changed. Started in the early part of 2008, a group of t-shirt artists and designers formed together under the name of the West Side Mordor Manticores, or just Manticores for short. Started as a joke thread on the t-shirt site Emptees.com by the artist GodMachine, we soon found a purpose, exposing and humiliating thieves.

Since their creation, they have stopped an unknown number of “rips” on Design By Humans, Threadless, Myspace, and even on their own home turf of Emptees. The audacity!

Just this week, Ray Frenden was ripped off by someone, Ray is one of the people who I look up to and revere, he’s a hero, and an amazing artist and extremely helpful in the community, always willing to help out another artist. As soon as he put out the call, we were by his side. Whether or not this has done any good is yet to be decided, but we know that the kid will probably never work in the design business.

So in short, Don’t steal designs, we’re always watching, waiting in the dark.

Check out these references for more about the Manticores
Manticores on Wikipedia
The Official Manticore Thread on Emptees

-V