If you were on twitter yesterday no doubt you will have got wind of the Paperchase scandal. It would appear that poor @HiddenEloise had her designs ripped off by Paperchase.  As the story unfolded over the course of the day it transpired that Paperchase had sourced the image from a “well-known central London design agency”. It’s quite clearly the same illustration with just different colours and background:

Here’s the original:

And here’s the ‘copy’:

The scandal caused on Twitter must have done some damage to the reputation of Paperchase, so much so that by the end of the day the company had withdrawn products from Amazon that used the offending image and issued an apology on their website.  Perhaps with some serious crisis management from the right PR firm the business could still save face and @HiddenEloise will hopefully get the credit, recognition and money she deserves.

There’s a reason why ownership is nine tenths of the law and plagiarism is just plain theft. Plagiarism is something that happens every day to companies big and small and often the process of getting justice is just far too expensive.

We often spot examples of shameless plagiarism here at Fluid Creativity. They usually raise a laugh, so we thought we’d share a few of our favourite spots with our fine readers.

Check out Made By White’s gorgeous broach designs:

And Topshop’s identical copies.

The word autotrace was mentioned on their blog:

Its not just the big boys taking advantage – sometimes it works the other way around.

In this day and age every design is inspired by something else but to down right copy can be embarrassing for all parties involved. Take North Face – they are currently taking legal action against The South Butt.

Of course, in this case the plagiarism is obvious, a parody to emphasise that The South Butt’s aesthetics and values are the polar opposite of The North Face. However, it could still be argued that they’re using the familiar branding of a much more succesful company to market their products, just like those “Arribas” and “Nyke” trainers you’ll see down at your local market.

It’s not just illustrations and images, there are loads of copied videos around: Remember these fun finger-puppetry videos that went viral in 2006?

How about the Hula Hoop ads that popped up a couple of years later?

We’re saying nothing!

In September last year new students at UQAM in Quebec Canada had a viral hit on their hands with their excellent lipdub of the Black Eye’d Peas “I’ve Got a Feeling”, involving 172 students as the camera travels throughout the college in one continuous shot. This video has been incredibly popular, with over 4 million views and counting.

Incredibly, leading London marketing agency Publicis ended up with a Twitter Turkey (should that be Twurkey?) when they decided to do a somewhat similar thing for their 2009 “Christmas Card”. This video was roundly slated in virtually every corner of the internet – just take a look at the comments at Youtube!

This hot topic has been discussed previously by Fluid. Check out Phil’s blog post “How Todd Picquelle stole graphic design and didn’t get away with it”

You can make your mind up but we’re sure these examples say enough. Hopefully this post will raise this issue that plagiarism is not accepted and shame those copy cats thinking about ripping off their next design to be more original.

Do you have any examples of people you want outed? Go crazy with the comments below.