Why stolen art keeps reappearing on print-on-demand sites

• A print-on-demand listing costs a seller almost nothing to create and nothing to keep in stock, so removing one listing barely hurts them.
• Reports remove the listing, not the person's ability to open another. Platforms say they act against repeat infringers, but they do not publish how many notices that takes.
• The same image can be on several sites at once. A removal on one does not touch the others.
• So the useful question is not how to remove a copy for good, but how soon you see the next one.

On a print-on-demand site the seller holds no stock. A product is made only when someone buys it, so a shop can carry a very large number of listings at no cost. Some platforms also push listings to other marketplaces. That is the point of the model, and it is also why a single removal has little effect on someone who has hundreds of listings up.

Artists report the same pattern in the press. In 2018 an illustrator told Print & Promo Marketing that after he reported his work to Teespring and it removed the apparel, similar designs kept appearing, which he called a “hamster wheel”. Print & Promo Marketing, 18 July 2018. The same article reports artists suspecting that sellers copy designs from a site where the originals sell well; that is their suspicion, not something the article proved.

A 2019 report on Waxy.org described stores that appeared to watch Twitter for phrases like “I want this on a shirt”, take the artwork from the post, and create a listing with no person involved. In the author's test, a listing appeared within hours of the request. The author says the bots tracked text, not images, which is how a counter-trick worked. Similar listings turned up on other sites, and the spam continued. Waxy.org, December 2019. The article describes allegations and one test, not a measured rate.

When listings are made by a script, it is no surprise that a removal does not stop the next one: nobody decided to take your work, a program did, and it keeps running.

In 2021 a seller told Print & Promo Marketing that he uploaded one design to Etsy through his printing partner and found it, weeks later, on Merch by Amazon, where scammers had sold about 20 shirts with it. Sellers said the copied art was often lifted from the product mockup rather than the original upload. Amazon told the publication it uses vetting and moderation, removes items quickly when it finds or is alerted to infringement, and pursues legal action where appropriate; the article notes that the sheer volume of products makes catching every listing hard. Print & Promo Marketing, 29 September 2021.

The practical point: your picture on a mockup, a social post or a storefront is a copy-ready file. Anyone, or any script, can take it from there.

• Etsy: terminates selling privileges for members with repeat or multiple notices “in appropriate circumstances and at Etsy's discretion”, and may refuse service to a terminated member who opens a new shop and to accounts it believes are associated. The page does not say how many notices trigger this. Etsy's IP policy.
• Redbubble: restricts accounts that attract repeated infringement claims. A restricted account cannot sell, and Redbubble says it will not tell the seller which works are the problem. It also says new accounts can be briefly restricted for up to five business days, which is a setup restriction, not necessarily a sign of infringement. Redbubble help.
• Temu: says it terminates repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances, without defining them. See our Temu guide.

None of these pages gives a number, a timeline or a way for you to see whether a seller has been flagged before. Reporting still matters: it is the step that creates the record those policies depend on. But it is a record on the platform's side that you cannot see.

• Expect to report more than once. Plan it as a routine, not a single event. Keep one folder per work with your original, dated proof and the log of each report.
• Report each listing, and say what you saw before. If the same seller or the same image returns, say so in the next notice, with the earlier report date. It does not change the law, but it gives the reviewer the history.
• Check other sites for the same image. A removal on one marketplace says nothing about the others. See what to do on Temu, Redbubble and Amazon.
• Keep your proof ready. See how to prove you made your artwork and use the notice template.
• Think about what you post. A smaller image, a visible name on the file or a watermark in the picture will not stop theft, but it makes a copy easier to prove and easier to spot.

If copies come back, the thing you can control is how fast you notice. TraceMyAssets checks the artworks you register on a schedule and shows possible matches for you to review. Scheduled scans run weekly or monthly on the free plan and daily, weekly or monthly on the paid plans. In our own tests, the visual comparison recognised copies that were resized, recompressed, recoloured or put into a screenshot, but only part of the time for small crops and small mockups, and it did not flag unrelated images. We tested on three synthetic images, so we make no claim about a catch rate on real listings.

Limits you should know: we only see public pages a search engine has indexed, so a brand-new listing can take time to show up, and a private or app-only listing may never appear. A match is a possible match, never proof, and you decide what to do and send every notice yourself. We do not contact anyone for you and we cannot stop a seller from posting again. See three ways to find copies of your artwork for how the approaches compare.

• How often removed designs return. No source we found measures it.
• Current detection or repeat-seller systems at any platform. Their pages describe policy, not results, and the press pieces are from 2018 to 2021.
• Whether the incidents in the articles were resolved afterwards.
• Platforms we did not research, including Shopify stores, Society6, TeePublic and Pinterest.

• Print & Promo Marketing: Teespring has a stolen designs problem (18 July 2018)
• Print & Promo Marketing: Merch by Amazon sellers say the platform is full of scammers stealing designs (29 September 2021)
• Waxy.org: How artists on Twitter tricked spammy t-shirt stores (December 2019)
• Etsy: Our House Rules (intellectual property)
• Redbubble Help: Why was my account restricted?