After 15 years of running a small business making T-shirts, Warwick Levy describes the moment he first found an identical design for sale on Temu as "brutal." Not brutal in the sense of a tough workout or a particularly spicy curry - brutal in the sense of watching your life's work get uploaded, duplicated, and sold by strangers who didn't bother to ask.
It turned out there wasn't just one. Between 2025 and earlier this year, Levy, 37, discovered thousands of rip-offs of his designs on the Chinese e-commerce marketplace. Thousands. At his Sydney label Lonely Kids Club, he produces graphic T-shirts in collaboration with local artists, which makes the whole thing feel less like a compliment and more like a heist.
"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," Levy says. A sentiment that somehow manages to be both painfully obvious and depressingly under-addressed by the platforms enabling it.
Levy is urging Temu to take greater responsibility for copyright infringement by the merchants who sell products on its website, to do more to stamp it out, and to improve its complaints processes - a list of demands that sounds less like a radical ask and more like the bare minimum of running a functional marketplace.
His story is the latest in a string of complaints by designers accusing major companies of facilitating theft of their designs. In many of these cases, AI "scraping" tools may have been used to extract their art online before it was copied - because nothing says innovation like teaching a machine to steal faster.
Despite original creative works being automatically protected by copyright law in Australia, making a claim of copyright infringement is not necessarily straightforward. So straightforward, in fact, that the Albanese government is currently 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 believes his T-shirts were copied by an AI tool that scraped 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. So not just the designs - the whole storefront, copy-pasted onto a platform where the original creator has no say.
Levy notes that generative AI was not used in any of his T-shirt designs, which makes the whole situation feel like being robbed by a robot you never invited into your house. He says any government moves to facilitate the AI scraping of creative content would be "devastating."
Ultimately, Levy was able to get Temu to take down the listings - not by making a copyright claim over the designs, but by making a trademark claim over the "Lonely Kids Club" brand name that sellers were using on their listings. Because apparently the only thing that gets a platform's attention is when you can prove someone's using your actual name, not just your actual art.
Levy describes attempting to complain to Temu as a stressful process full of "roadblocks": 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 - though he says he has spotted some copycat T-shirts since then.
A Temu spokesperson said it is a marketplace used by independent sellers, whom it prohibits 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. A suggestion that, given the thousands of stolen designs, the AI scraping, and the bureaucratic obstacle course required to get them removed, seems less like a demand and more like a plea for basic competence.