Since I posted about PinDIY on my Instagram (the post is now archived), there has been a lot of information that was sent my way. I decided there should be a more permanent and easily accessible place for all that information to live, so this blog post is it. Please feel free to comment below with additional information and/or suggestions.
So, PinDIY dot com (I’m purposely not adding links to this website) is a website I came across quite by accident a couple of days ago. I noticed they are illegally selling my Laurel Leaf Pullover that I published through Purl Soho. I immediately contacted Purl Soho’s co-owner about this. She left a comment on PinDIY demanding the removal of the pattern from the website. Her comment was deleted immediately and there has been no other action taken by the website. The pullover pattern, along with several other of my patterns, is still there.
Upon researching more about this website, I found out that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of both knitting and crochet patterns that are being distributed illegally. There are even entire books that have been uploaded onto this site! How did they get all this digital content?! Several designers and I decided to compare our Ravelry sales reports to find the thieves (we were assuming it would be several people) but soon found out that the website actively encourages its users to upload stolen patterns onto the website by rewarding them with “coins”, the currency used on this website. This means hundreds and hundreds of people are involved in uploading their personal copies of patterns onto this site. In fact, on the website’s TOS/Rules page, the website admins blatantly say that they do not care about copyrights and theft, and any user who brings up anything about copyright infringements will immediately be blocked.
Things got worse as we learned more about this website. There are reports that PinDIY is spreading malware through the PDFs that they distribute, and when users open these PDFs, their computers get hacked and their personal information gets stolen. Bank account and credit card information are what they are after. Here is a YouTube video that explains how dangerous it is to download PDFs from piracy websites, like PinDIY.
Before discussing what we can do against this website, let’s take a look at what we found out about it on hostingchecker.com:
The website is hosted by: Alibaba.com LLC
WHOIS information: Click here
Organization name: ALICLOUD-US
IP address: 47.88.61.188
AS(autonomous system) number and organization: AS45102 Alibaba (US) Technology Co., Ltd.
AS name: CNNIC-ALIBABA-US-NET-AP
Reverse DNS of the IP:
City: San Mateo
Country: United States
Alibaba is a company based in China and it operates similarly to Amazon. PinDIY appears to be hosted by Alibaba’s US branch, so there is hope that we can get Alibaba to force PinDIY to either remove illegal content or shut the website down entirely.
Please do not use this information as an excuse to berate China and/or Chinese people. Thieves are everywhere regardless of geography, ethnicity, and nationality. I’ll be closely monitoring comments and will delete comments and/or block anyone who starts spewing xenophobic/racist rhetoric.
HERE ARE THINGS WE CAN DO
Designers/owners of stolen content
Report PinDIY to Alibaba
Here is the link for reporting copyright infringements. Btw this may take about 15-20 minutes, so it’s not something you can do on the go. Also, you need to be on your desktop computer as the form requires you to upload files.
Report PinDIY to Google
Here is the link for reporting (select Google Search). Reporting to Google will prevent the URLs with your patterns from showing up in Google Search. Obviously, this does not solve the problem entirely, but it can have a serious dent in the traffic this website receives.
File a DMCA (Claims of Copyright Infringement) with Apple
Click the link here to file a claim to get the PinDIY removed from Apple’s app store.
Report PinDIY to PayPal
PinDIY accepts payments through their PayPal address www.paypal.me/pindiy. You can report this account to PayPal by following this link and inform them of PinDIY’s illegal activity, which goes against PayPal’s Terms of Service.
Everyone
Report PinDIY app
Here is the link for reporting the app to Apple. (Fill out your info - be sure you read the bit at the top about how they use it). The next screen will ask for the URL of the app, it's: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pindiy-crochet-knitting-works/id1560534288 Fill that in, then write a sentence or two saying what the problem is.)
Btw, the PinDIY app is active on Samsung and Android phones too, but it appears under the name Daohei. To report the app in the Google Play store on a Samsung or Android phone, there is a menu in the top right-hand corner with an option to Report as Inappropriate. You can select "Other" and type in the free text box: this app is selling stolen digital files without consent from their copyright owners and spreading malware.
Spread the word about how dangerous piracy websites like PinDIY are, especially the part about malware being spread through the PDFs this kind of sites/apps distribute.
WHAT ELSE CAN BE DONE?
Several designers are looking into the route of filing a class-action lawsuit. I don’t know how realistic this is, but I thought we could start preparing for it and gather information in advance just so we can move quickly if there is a chance at a lawsuit. I have created a form in order to make a list of designers/content owners who have been affected by PinDIY. I’ll keep this list private and only share it with lawyers if/when there is a chance of a class-action lawsuit. The form asks you for:
Your first and last name
Your email address where you can be contacted
Your location (city and country)
Links to where on PinDIY your patterns are being sold illegally
Links to where your patterns are sold legally (Ravelry, your website, etc)
Amount of loss (look at each pattern’s number of downloads and multiply that by the pattern’s price - do this for each pattern)
Btw fill this form even if your patterns are free. Most of us offer free patterns to drive traffic to our websites, blogs, and/or to advertise other patterns. I’m not sure what amount you should enter for loss; I’ll leave it up to you. If we get any advice from lawyers, we’ll contact you for additional information.
Designers in the UK! Please email Juliet of UK Handknitting at juliet@ukhandknitting.com. She has spoken with Action Fraud in the UK and will be filing a report.
PREVENTATIVE MEASURES
PDF stamping is something that can slow down the illegal distribution of digital content. While the stamped part of patterns can be cropped out, it still requires additional software to do that. Payhip offers this feature - click here to read about it. WaterWoo is a PDF-stamping plug-in that’s available for WooCommerce based websites. SendOwl offers PDF-stamping for Shopify-based websites. Unfortunately, Ravelry doesn’t offer this feature yet, so we should contact them and request this service.
Several designers have suggested adding a line saying “My patterns are available in such and such websites only“ within the pattern PDFs, so whoever accesses these PDFs can know if they got the pirated copy or an original. I think we can also add a line warning knitters/readers that if they downloaded/obtained their PDF elsewhere, it may contain viruses/malware.
Thank you everyone for sharing information and helping put together this blog post!
PS: HELPFUL RESOURCES:
www.stopfakes.gov (there is an IPR toolkit by countries)
JULY 14 UPDATE
Here is PinDIY contact info obtained via Apple (thank you Patty Lyons!) Patty has shared this text for us to email the developers:
I think you have intentionally violated my legal rights under 17 U.S.C. Section 101 et seq. and can be liable for statutory damage as high as $130,000 as set-forth in Sec. 504 (c)(2) of the Digital millennium copyright act (DMCA) therein. This message is official notification. I demand the elimination of the infringing materials described above. Please take note as a service provider, the Dmca demands you, to remove and/or terminate access to the infringing content upon receipt of this particular notice. In case you don't stop the use of the above mentioned infringing materials a lawsuit will be initiated against you. I do have a good belief that use of the copyrighted materials referenced above as presumably infringing is not authorized by the copyright proprietor, its agent, or the laws. I declare, under penalty of perjury, that the information in this letter is correct and that I am currently the legal copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive… (include a link(s) to your patterns on PinDIY)
Patty suggests we email them all and email them non-stop!!! Also, Apple is looking into taking down PinDIY app! So, folks, all the reporting we have done seems to be making waves!
On a related note, Sarah Krentz, one of the many designers who has been affected by PinDIY, has been contacted on Ravelry by someone who used to be active on PinDIY. This person identified PinDIY’s owner as someone named Yiri Han (his email address is listed second to last in the PinDIY contact info above) and his assistant (who is an admin named Turqoise on the site) is a Turkish woman named Selnurd Denson.
July 29 UPDATE
Folks, I needed to step away from this problem for the past week because it has been too much to handle…
So far, the piracy website is still working, BUT their apps are gone from Apple and Google Play stores. It seems that they have changed their web-host from Alibaba Cloud (see the original post above) to Cloudflare, so now we need to send DMCA Takedown Notice to Cloudflare. Please see Miriam Felton’s blog post where she walks you through the reporting process step by step (see Part II of the post because Name Silo can’t really do anything as they are not the web host).
On a different note, this past Wednesday, I took a workshop with Kiffanie Stahle about copyrights and protecting our creative work from copycats, a slightly different issue than what we are dealing with here, but still, it was helpful in thinking about the most effective steps to take when it comes to copyright infringements and infringers. By the way, this article from Knitty explains the basics of copyrights and how they relate to knitting patterns and items knitted from patterns.
As indie knitwear/crochet designers, pursuing legal actions against copyright infringers is out of reach for most of us. While our work (knit/crochet patterns) is automatically copyrighted at the time of its publication/recording (btw Instagram/Facebook posts of our designs are also considered publications/recordings, apparently), we need to register our work with the US Copyright Office within the first three months of publication in order to reap the most benefits from the protections copyrights grant. That being said, it seems to be quite tricky to enforce US copyrights abroad, despite the USA being part of the Berne Convention, and it is impossible to do without having to hire a lawyer that’s local to the country where the infringement is occurring.
According to Stahle, the copyright laws have been written in the 80’ and had art galleries, big-time musicians, and artists in mind. But, a lot has changed since, and these laws do not address the needs of a lot of creatives nowadays (one has to prove significant financial loss in order to be able to bring a lawsuit in federal court). So, sometime soon (between 12.27.2021 and 6.25.2022), it will be possible to claim copyright infringements through Small Claims Court thanks to the CASE Act that was signed into law in 2020 (read more about it here). This will allow a more feasible/affordable way to pursue legal action against copyright infringement in the US.
But back to the piracy website… Right now, the most effective thing we can do is make sure their content does not show up on US-based platforms (btw DMCA Takedown Notices only work for US-based platforms). Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, etc all have reporting features where we can send the URL addresses and have that content taken down. With PinDIY, I’m still hopeful we can get Cloudflare to kick them off because Cloudflare is US-based.
By the way, we need to contact Ravelry about adding the pdf-stamping feature to the platform. That alone could resolve a lot of problems about the illegal distribution of patterns. On a related note, we need to be adding a line about the intended use of the patterns in the pattern listings. Things such as “for personal use only,” “do not distribute this file“, “not intended for selling finished items,“ “by purchasing this pattern, you are agreeing to these terms“ etc etc. I know lots of us already have such wording inside the documents, but it is a good idea to have that information within the pattern listings so potential customers do not have to wonder about these things. Plus, this information constitutes Terms of Service (or Contract) when it is available to customers prior to purchase. If people choose to distribute patterns illegally, then this is a whole other avenue for legal action (breach of TOS/contract).
On a personal note, I’ve come to realize pacing myself is really important as these kinds of problems eat away so much energy and time. I’m going to take some time this coming weekend to send DMCA notices to Cloudflare. Next weekend, I’m going to spend some time sending those URLs to Google (to stop them from showing up in Google Searches). The weekend after, I’m going to do a few more things related to this issue. Ignoring this problem won’t make it disappear, but neither will burning myself out trying to tackle this huge problem at once. I hope that whoever is reading this will do the same.
