A young poster designer has initiated legal proceedings against Shopify in Australia, alleging the multinational e-commerce platform refused to remove online 'ghost stores' that imitated his website and stole his work.
Legal Action Against Shopify
Ryan Billington, 20, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in the Federal Circuit Court in Brisbane earlier this month. The case targets Shopify and two websites, clutchposters.com and audibleposters.com, which he claims copied 'substantially all' of his original designs. This court action represents a rare attempt to hold global platforms accountable for hosting so-called ghost stores, rather than pursuing the operators of these clandestine sites, who may not be located in the countries they claim to operate from.
Background of the Case
According to court documents, Billington described the allegedly infringing websites as similar to ghost stores that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) urged Shopify and Meta to take action against last year. Ghost stores exist only digitally and often pose as legitimate brands to deceive customers, who may receive poor-quality goods or nothing at all. Billington, who runs radialposters.com from his home in New Zealand, alleges that the scam websites delivered only electronic JPEG files to customers instead of actual posters.
Billington lodged 45 infringement notices with Shopify regarding the alleged copycat sites before taking legal action. In his statement of claim filed on May 13, he raised 3,929 instances where clutchposters.com and audibleposters.com allegedly copied his designs. Despite his solicitor contacting Shopify's legal counsel on April 23 to request the websites' removal, the company never responded, according to court documents.
Challenges in Copyright Enforcement
As previously reported by Guardian Australia, while original creative works are automatically protected by copyright law in Australia, making a claim of infringement is not straightforward. The court documents list three people as secondary respondents who claimed to be the UK-based operators of the websites, but Billington alleges these are false names used by the individuals who set up the imitative sites.
Both allegedly infringing websites appeared to have been taken down as of Friday, nine days after the lawsuit was filed and the day after Guardian Australia inquired about the case. Guardian Australia was unable to contact the websites for comment, and Shopify declined to comment on the record.
Designer's Experience
Billington told Guardian Australia that his work had been 'systematically copied' and sold 'on a massive scale,' describing the experience as stressful and frustrating. He provided Shopify with ownership evidence, including original Photoshop project source files, but continued to receive 'legal template responses.'
In July last year, the ACCC issued a rare public warning after a Guardian Australia investigation identified over 140 ghost stores built using Shopify's e-commerce software. The ACCC confirmed it had received responses from Meta and Shopify after writing to them about the issue but refused a freedom of information request for the letters, partly because the companies did not want them made public. Shopify, a Canadian multinational, has not previously responded to Guardian Australia's repeated requests for comment on the ghost stores issue.
