Beware of CosplayHouse.com!!! (Warning: Cher's stepping up on a soapbox...)
As all of you know, I very, very rarely post in my LiveJournal, preferring Facebook instead. ;) But just yesterday, I discovered something that touched on one of my very biggest pet peeves, which is people who steal other people's work/property/etc and attempt to make a quick buck off of it. Stealing is stealing, whether it's physical or intellectual property, and it's completely unfair (not to mention illegal) to the people who've put their blood, sweat and tears into the initial work. And this particular issue touches not only me, but also many of you, my fellow costumers; which is why I was motivated enough by it to crank up my LJ for the first time in, well, years.
In a nutshell: I was surfing the Internet yesterday, researching costume reference photos for Quidditch gear from the Harry Potter films. Most of you know I'm a huge Potter fan/cosplayer, and have pretty much completed several versions of the Quidditch outfits from the various films. But I'm always tweaking my costume stuff, and am wanting to re-make part of my Quidditch padding--namely the elbow pads--to be more accurate, and had Googled images of Harry Potter costumes to find reference pics. Specifically I was looking for movie stills, but of course all sorts of related pictures pop up, including photos of other fan-made costumes; one of these appeared to be a thumbnail of what looked like the glove from my own set of Quidditch gear, so just out of curiousity I clicked on it.
It was then I found that apparently this online costume business, CosplayHouse.com, was using photos of MY Quidditch gear and claiming them as their own work to sell costume commissions. They shouldn't really be making these items for money anyway, as anything Harry Potter is technically the intellectual property of Warner Brothers, and certainly both the content in the photos and the photos themselves are stolen. I made these costume items for my personal use, not for sale or distribution, and the photos here were taken by a friend of mine for her own reference (with my permission). Here's the link to CosplayHouse.com's site advertising the items in question:
http://www.cosplayhouse.com/Harry-Potter-Quidditch-Player-Cosplay-Costume-Version-01.html
And here's the link to my friend's Flickr account that they lifted the photos directly from, without permission from either of us:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/evilbenius/5813626456/in/set-72157626793949733/
I even have an earlier post here on LJ from when I was first building my Quidditch gear, and you can definitely tell the padding in all the photos is the same:
http://starheel42.livejournal.com/5393.html
SO...I've e-mailed CosplayHouse.com's customer service and asked them to remove the photos, but have gotten no response so far, and and the photos are still up. I also reported the images to Google, but was told (twice) that after a review of six seconds, they don't feel the photos are a violation of any of their policies, so I can expect no help there. In the end, I've talked with a lawyer friend of mine to see what my legal options might be; if nothing else, we may be able to send a C&D. But mainly, I wanted to give all of you, my fellow costumers, a heads up regarding this company; not only are they involved in a wide variety of theft, but I can pretty much guarantee you that anything you order from this site is not going to match up with the photos, which is a misrepresentation of goods/services. (You may also all want to take a look at this site yourself, to see if you come across anything you recognize; another costuming friend of mine confirmed that one of their other advertised products used photos lifted off another personal Flickr account.)
Buyer, beware.
In a nutshell: I was surfing the Internet yesterday, researching costume reference photos for Quidditch gear from the Harry Potter films. Most of you know I'm a huge Potter fan/cosplayer, and have pretty much completed several versions of the Quidditch outfits from the various films. But I'm always tweaking my costume stuff, and am wanting to re-make part of my Quidditch padding--namely the elbow pads--to be more accurate, and had Googled images of Harry Potter costumes to find reference pics. Specifically I was looking for movie stills, but of course all sorts of related pictures pop up, including photos of other fan-made costumes; one of these appeared to be a thumbnail of what looked like the glove from my own set of Quidditch gear, so just out of curiousity I clicked on it.
It was then I found that apparently this online costume business, CosplayHouse.com, was using photos of MY Quidditch gear and claiming them as their own work to sell costume commissions. They shouldn't really be making these items for money anyway, as anything Harry Potter is technically the intellectual property of Warner Brothers, and certainly both the content in the photos and the photos themselves are stolen. I made these costume items for my personal use, not for sale or distribution, and the photos here were taken by a friend of mine for her own reference (with my permission). Here's the link to CosplayHouse.com's site advertising the items in question:
http://www.cosplayhouse.com/Harry-Potter-Quidditch-Player-Cosplay-Costume-Version-01.html
And here's the link to my friend's Flickr account that they lifted the photos directly from, without permission from either of us:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/evilbenius/5813626456/in/set-72157626793949733/
I even have an earlier post here on LJ from when I was first building my Quidditch gear, and you can definitely tell the padding in all the photos is the same:
http://starheel42.livejournal.com/5393.html
SO...I've e-mailed CosplayHouse.com's customer service and asked them to remove the photos, but have gotten no response so far, and and the photos are still up. I also reported the images to Google, but was told (twice) that after a review of six seconds, they don't feel the photos are a violation of any of their policies, so I can expect no help there. In the end, I've talked with a lawyer friend of mine to see what my legal options might be; if nothing else, we may be able to send a C&D. But mainly, I wanted to give all of you, my fellow costumers, a heads up regarding this company; not only are they involved in a wide variety of theft, but I can pretty much guarantee you that anything you order from this site is not going to match up with the photos, which is a misrepresentation of goods/services. (You may also all want to take a look at this site yourself, to see if you come across anything you recognize; another costuming friend of mine confirmed that one of their other advertised products used photos lifted off another personal Flickr account.)
Buyer, beware.