We previously brought you the story of creator Skottie Young who took to Twitter to vent about his art being sold without his permission on clothing and other items through the website RedBubble. We reached out to RedBubble and received a response over the weekend. Through email, we learned about 20,000 works per month are removed. Some of this is in direct response to DMCA notices and some will be as a result of the pro-active polices, cited below, that the company takes.

RedBubble CEO Martin Hosking wrote us with the below info, which is similar to what we discussed years ago when we talked to them about the same subject:

First thing is once we were aware of the Skottie issue this morning we immediately took action. We do this under our normal processes. They may be more extensive than people realise and go beyond the strict requirements of the DMCA. I highlight this below.

You know this, but so it is in one place: Redbubble is a community built on respect, recognition and appreciation of original artists. We take matters of intellectual property extremely seriously. We value originality and creativity, and we strongly oppose infringement of copyright, trademark, publicity rights, or any other intellectual property rights.

I’d like to clarify that Redbubble does not itself manufacture, sell or distribute the products on its Web site.  Rather, Redbubble is the host of an online marketplace. Regardless, it is absolutely Redbubble’s policy and practice to respect intellectual property rights of others and to provide reasonable assistance to rights holders in this regards.

As you have written on in the past, in an effort to strike a balance between the rights of rights owners to prevent infringing uses of their intellectual property and the rights of visual artists to make non-infringing, and/or fair uses of related content, Redbubble has implemented a fairly extensive set of copyright, trademark and DMCA procedures, which are set forth at : http://support.redbubble.com/kb/top20/copyright-trademark-and-dmca.

Central to these procedures is our Notice and Takedown process, modeled after the one set out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Submitting a takedown notice is a fairly straightforward process, and once we receive the information required under the DMCA, we act expeditiously (typically within 24 hours) to remove any listing that a bona fide rights owner or licensee identifies as infringing. This takedown is always subject to our counter notification process, which gives sellers affected by takedowns the opportunity to establish their right to sell the material at issue. More detail about the take down and counter notice process can be found at the following URL: http://support.redbubble.com/kb/top20/redbubble-ippublicity-rights-policy#report

Although we’re not required by law, we take further proactive efforts on many occasions and work closely with numerous content owners, brands and individual artists to minimize instances of third party infringement of intellectual property rights via the Redbubble marketplace. We also immediately remove any user who is identified as a repeat infringer, per our policies.

Again, I want to emphasize, Redbubble takes matters of alleged IP infringement very seriously and we do not take lightly any suggestion (not that you have made this) that we have any other stance on this issue.

It’s good to see RedBubble take this issue seriously. This is an issue that’s beyond them, and one of the nature of the internet itself. With everybody able to quickly share, re-use, and re-post, this debate has raged for years, and I expect to continue for years to come.