bbcA small business owner said she was shocked and heartbroken to discover her card designs were being sold on online retail giant Temu’s website without her knowledge.
Anwen Roberts, owner of design company Draenog, said identical Welsh-language versions of her products appeared on the Chinese-based site after being copied without permission.
Roberts said it was an added pressure on small businesses like his in Caernarfon, Gwynedd, when he was trying to make a living.
Temu, which has removed the cards from its site, said it acted “quickly” when “possible infringements” were reported and that it aimed to protect brands and artists’ rights.
Temu, which is owned by Chinese giant PDD Holdings and was valued earlier this year at $150bn (£117bn), is a marketplace where third-party sellers offer their products directly to customers.
Roberts said it was a “huge shock” to see her work and designs being sold online without her knowledge.
“They were identical and used the designs we have online.” she told Newyddion S4C.
“It just breaks your heart a little bit to know that someone has used your work, published it, and is potentially making money off of something that I, as a small business, have created.”
Among the cards sold through Temu was nadolig llawen mam a dad (Merry Christmas, mom and dad in Welsh), which shows two hedgehogs nose to nose as snow falls.
Both the color, the greeting and the designs were the same.
Temu’s site card said nadolig llawen mama un papa while Draenog’s is mama un papa nadolig llawen.
Another card from the Temu site showed a large balloon with penblwydd hapus (happy birthday) written on it and tied to a dachshund, which was identical to a Draenog card.
Temu, which sells everything from clothing to electronics and furniture, launched in the US in 2022 and later in the UK and the rest of the worldand ships to around 50 countries.
“They can just take hundreds of thousands of images, pull them off the internet, create some text, do it very quickly and they lose weeks, months and hours of working with small businesses like I do and putting in a lot of effort.” time and energy,” said Ms. Roberts.
She said the responsibility of people like her to report issues was frustrating and time-consuming, as “there was also the time of having to track them down and know their rights.”
What can companies do to protect their rights?
The U.K. government body, the Intellectual Property Office, called intellectual property infringement a “local and global challenge” and said it worked with others to “help address the threat it poses to businesses and consumers.”
The IPO said it engaged with major e-commerce stores to remove products that were infringing or counterproductive. It also told them to “permanently remove persistent sellers from their platforms” and “published guidelines to help merchants protect their intellectual property rights on all major e-commerce stores, including Temu.”
The IPO said: “If people believe that their intellectual property rights are being infringed, or suspect that such products are being offered for sale on e-commerce sites or social media marketplaces, they should make use of the tools that these sites provide and always report it.”
Fflur Elin, from the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), said its research indicated that one in five small businesses experienced copying of their work when using the larger platforms.
“This is extremely challenging and many often feel helpless when taking their disputes to larger companies,” he added.
The FSB wants the UK government to “implement a system that allows disputes to be resolved between large companies and small businesses and to be paid for by a mechanism that increases fees for large platforms.”
Temu said it investigated this case and “removed the infringing products that were found.”
In a statement it added: “For sellers who repeatedly violate these rules or commit serious violations, we permanently ban them from the platform and remove all their products.
“We have invested a lot in intellectual property [intellectual property] rights protection, we expanded our intellectual property team and introduced an intellectual property portal and a brand protection center to increase effectiveness and efficiency in handling infringement claims.
“As a result, we resolve more than 99% of deletion requests in just a few days, which is faster than the industry average.”