In our third installment of Making It Work, The Verge takes a look at how creators and small businesses are dealing with familiar issues: imitations, copycats, and ripoffs. It’s an age-old challenge that has only gotten bigger as artists rely on online platforms to promote and distribute their work.
Making It Work 2022
How creators and businesses are overcoming imitators to thrive online
From fashion giants stealing from an independent designer to illustrators finding their work for sale on an unknown marketplace, here are the many ways creators are contending with a problem that keeps popping up in unexpected places.
Designers spend months making custom keycaps, then the counterfeits arrive
Keycap clones are readily available, affordable, and shameless
A renowned community of quilters is taking on copycats — and winning
Online sales gave Gee’s Bend quilters control over their work
The counterfeit NFT problem is only getting worse
So artists are joining together to fight back
Reselling gig work is TikTok’s newest side hustle
Service resellers find cheap labor on freelancer platforms like Fiverr, and flip services like graphic design or copywriting for profit
Knitwear is slow, the knockoffs come fast
Designers struggle with fast fashion copying their time-consuming creations
The complicated case of Threes, 2048, and the giants that ripped everyone off in the end
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery — and the most profitable way to make a mobile game
Artists are playing takedown whack-a-mole to fight counterfeit merch
‘There are all sorts of obstacles that are thrown up in front of artists’
Mexico’s cultural appropriation ban is off to a messy start
A law meant to protect Indigenous art might just be lip service