Is Etsy The New Silk Road For Copyright Infringement?

probably. if there is money to be had, their will be vultures ready to pounce. and there is lots of fresh work every day to steal. and because the products are small, it doesn't really matter what size the image is.

---Mike Savad

Thank you Guna for the information. Maybe not for long if this kind of information is on forms like this.

I hope Etsy will take some action to protect or at least closed shops with stolen images. I sell there mainly my jewelry and did not have really issues there. But for sure I have noticed strange things there- Asian shops of 100s of handmade articles. Interesting how many hands make them. To have a good quality and interesting designs I spend hours and hours ... but only with 2 hands

Anyone think this 'article' is just a great way to get traffic for PIXSY "our new service that finds and invoices image theft for you" ?
It is on their blog at PIXSY.com - just saying, we are the perfect target audience for this here..... can never be too careful, or too naive.

I would say not to expect ETSY to take action in your behalf in that regard.

We closed our jewelry shop there since they are in a constant state of live site "test" modes 10 months out of the year.

I am most disappointed with the site and there lack of customer care for their own vendors.

Obviously nothing new. However it is very disturbing. In my opinion this is not to advertise the new service offered by pixsy.
The images on the ETSY site in question are small and there is no way they to belong to a single person or even several people.
There are over 3000 products on Etsy shop and their site on amazon.com lists over 99,000 products. The images are from all over the world with no distinctive style.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_hi_1?me=A6OPGUU652CRX&rh=i%3Amerchant-items&ie=UTF8&qid=1412372670

This is a second time in the last 2 weeks when I read about cases like this one.
I saw images from an artist on Society6 on another site selling also cellphone cases (the company was based in Europe). Also thousands of products and images. Which means that many artists have their original images stolen. Even in small sizes but they use them for small objects and pretty successfully it seems.

Its a problem no doubt and not just with them. The internet in general does have its problems. Darn little thieves.