How am i supposed to feel about this?

Edit: This issue has now been resolved. And there are now no hard feelings between me and Darren @ Regal Clothing. This post was made when I was rather angry, and I would like to re-enforce that this issue is solved, and I have left this post up so that perhaps this doesn't happen to me again and perhaps it can serve as a warning? I don't know....

I've been a member of emptees for a while now, and it has been a great source of inspiration, a great place to get some help and critique, amongst countless other things. The one thing that has always entertained me has been watching as amazing designers, (godmachine, mumford, jimiyo, collision theory, nicole nimmor...) reaction to crazy kids from the far east use vector tracing to steal their work.

It is amazing to see these guys who are so talented, see the funny side in people stealing their work. I will always remember one post where an artist seem to see it as his right of passage that someone had stolen his work!! The strange acceptance that at some point someone will steal your work and the best hope you've got is to just laugh about it, is amazing.

Well if that is the case then I have arrived, rather sadly.

I did this design whilst I was in uni, it wasn't appropriate for the project I was working on so it was just shelved for the best part of 5 years. I joined emptees and it seemed like a great place to start as it would make a neat little shirt design.



Here is the design as I posted on emptees 3 months ago.

I recently joined Design Forums, wicked message board, and one of their features is a portfolio/slideshow on their page, which members upload and images are selected at random, and I saw part of my design on a tshirt on there!

Now this was a bit of a suprise, as I followed the link to a company/guy who had shown interest in buying the original design and he had just plain copied it!



Now I'm not going to post links to all the relevant places here, but I have yet to react to this properly.

Time to go...
Michael