Sydney-based graphic T-shirt label Lonely Kids Club has accused the Chinese e-commerce platform Temu of listing thousands of its designs for sale, with founder Warwick Levy describing the situation as "brutal." Levy, who has run the small business for 15 years, discovered an "overwhelming amount" of identical T-shirts on Temu between 2025 and earlier this year. He believes his designs were copied by AI tools that scraped his company's entire website, including product descriptions and mock-ups.
Levy expressed his dismay at seeing his work generate money for unknown individuals who had allegedly stolen it. He urged Temu to take greater responsibility for copyright infringement by its sellers and to improve its complaint processes, which he described as stressful and full of "roadblocks." Standard reporting forms reportedly failed or closed, and direct emails yielded no results.
Amid broader concerns from artists and small brands about design theft by large online retailers, the Australian government is currently negotiating copyright reforms with major AI companies. These proposed changes could grant tech firms legal rights to scrape online content for training AI models, a move Levy believes would be "devastating" for creators.
Ultimately, Levy was able to get the majority of the infringing listings removed from Temu by leveraging a trademark claim over the "Lonely Kids Club" brand name, rather than a copyright claim. He noted that some copycat T-shirts have reappeared since the initial takedown.
A Temu spokesperson stated that the platform is used by independent sellers who are prohibited from listing infringing products. The company confirmed it promptly removed the listings in question following Lonely Kids Club's reports via its IP Protection Portal and has added the brand's works to its monitoring database. Sellers are required to comply with platform policies, and violations can lead to listing removal, account suspension, or permanent bans.