‘Brutal’: thousands of T-shirt designs stolen and listed on Temu, Sydney label claims
After 15 years running a small business making T-shirts, Warwick Levy says it was “brutal” when he first discovered an identical design for sale on
After 15 years running a small business making T-shirts, Warwick Levy says it was “brutal” when he first discovered an identical design for sale on Temu. It turned out there was an overwhelming amount of T-shirts identical to his own for sale on the Chinese e-commerce marketplace. Between 2025 and earlier this year, Levy, 37, found thousands of rip-offs. “It’s pretty gut-wrenching to see that your work is now making so much money for other people that you don’t know, [who has] just stolen your work,” says Levy, who produces the graphic T-shirts at his Sydney label Lonely Kids Club in collaboration with local artists. Levy urged Temu to take greater responsibility for copyright infringement by the merchants who sell products on its website, do more to stamp it out, and improve its complaints processes. His story is the latest in a string of complaints by designers accusing major companies of facilitating theft of their designs, cases in which AI “scraping” tools may have been used to extract their art online before it was copied.
Despite original creative works being automatically protected by copyright law in Australia, making a claim of copyright infringement is not necessarily straightforward. View image in fullscreen A comparison of a T-shirt as sold by Lonely Kids Club and Temu. Composite: Supplied Amid broader concerns from artists and small brands about their designs being regurgitated by massive online retailers, the Albanese government is considering giving AI companies greater access to Australians’ content. The government remains entangled in copyright negotiations with major AI companies, but the proposed reforms could give tech companies the legal right to scrape online content and use it to train their latest AI models. Levy says he believed his T-shirts were copied by an AI tool which took the designs by scraping the entire Lonely Kids Club website. “We have a catalogue of 4,000 products … all of those products were there with our exact item descriptions, our exact brand name, like everything, even our exact mock-ups that we’ve created and our own product photography that we’ve taken,” he says.
Levy, who notes that generative AI was not used in any of his T-shirt designs, says any government moves to facilitate the AI scraping of creative content would be “devastating”. skip past newsletter promotion Free newsletter | When needed Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks Enter your email Sign up after newsletter promotion Ultimately, Levy says he was able to get Temu to take down the listings by making a trademark claim rather than a copyright claim over the designs, because the sellers were using the “Lonely Kids Club” brand name on their listings. Levy says that attempting to complain to Temu was a stressful process full of “roadblocks”: the standard reporting forms kept failing or closing, and direct emails “got nowhere”. He used his Australian trademark over his business name to bulk-report the listings and the overwhelming majority came down, although he said he had spotted some copycat T-shirts since then.
A Temu spokesperson said it was a marketplace used by independent sellers, whom it prohibited from listing products that “infringe intellectual property rights”. “We have promptly removed the listings in question following Lonely Kids Club’s reports through our IP Protection Portal, and have added the brand’s works to our IP Protection database for ongoing monitoring,” they said. “We take swift action to address any potential infringements once they are identified. “Sellers are required to comply with applicable laws and platform policies, and those found to violate our IP policies are subject to enforcement actions, including listing removal, account suspensions, or permanent bans.” Levy says Temu should hold itself and its sellers to a higher standard.
The BriefWire