I proudly printed the Farm Aid 2017 shirts this year, most of them organic cotton and some also union made and nearly all USA made. So it is extremely disturbing to see a host of companies selling designs stolen from Farm Aid printed and embroidered on a bunch of crappy shirts.

Repeated emails and filings to Amazon and three weeks later there are still dozens of bootleg Farm Aid garments for sale. You can add eBay to the companies aiding and abetting these thieves.

They only seem to care if they get their percentage and have almost no vetting of the companies they work with or the trademark violating shirts they are selling. One site TEEPUBLIC ironically states, “Each purchase supports an independent artist.”

More like each sale supports a crook, like their one vendor who clearly does not have any of the licenses to sell a host of concert shirts listed on his section of their site which he will gladly ship to you from Indonesia.

Folks just rip off images from the internet and DTG (digital direct to garment) them on to shirts or any number of things. It should be harder to sell fake stuff than to stop people from selling your fake stuff, but apparently it isn’t.

All of us that are artists and small businesses are suffering with this BS and it is time to put the pressure on the garment sites to not turn a blind eye to crooks using their services.

Thanks again to my friend Andy MacDougall who first brought this to my attention.