Zara

Zara: stop stealing other people’s art. Seriously.

Zara: stop stealing other people’s art. Seriously.

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Wow. Fashion giant Zara has been stealing indie artists’ designs and passing them off as its own.


Independent designer Tuesday Bassen has posted pictures on social media of her own designs next to Zara’s copies of them. “Over the past year, Zara has been copying my artwork,” she wrote. “I had my lawyer contact Zara and they literally said I have no base because I’m an indie artist and they’re a major corporation and that not enough people even know about me for it to matter.”


Bassen has already had to pay thousands of dollars in legal fees to try to get Zara to stop stealing her artwork. But Zara is using its corporate might and huge legal budget to shut her down -- and now she has a huge, expensive legal fight on her hands.


Zara doesn’t care about independent artists. But it does care about protecting its brand. If thousands of stand up to its shoddy practices, we can show Zara that art theft is really, really bad for its brand -- and its bottom line.


Zara: stop stealing other people’s art. Seriously.


And it’s not just one designer. After Bassen went public with her claims, another artist started cataloguing all the designs Zara has stolen from independent artists. And there are more than 40 of them.


The artists affected say: “Though some of the themes maybe be simple shapes or icons, Zara’s replications are near-identical, and the massive scale of this theft from a tight-knit creative scene implies a conscious choice by Zara, Bershka, Pull&Bear, Stradivarius and the parent company Inditex to not bother making significant modifications. None of us have signed art licensing agreements, which are the standard way of compensating an artist to use their work for commercial purposes like these.”


Big corporations shouldn’t be able to ride roughshod over copyright infringement laws just because they have a bigger legal budget. But Zara is -- so it’s down to us to stand up to the corporation.


We’ve had a major success pressuring Zara before. After 300,000 SumOfUs members told the fashion giant to stop selling Angora wool, produced by plucking live angora rabbits, Zara committed to stop selling it. Now let’s hold Zara accountable for art theft.


Zara: stop stealing independent artists' artwork and passing it off as your own!


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