You would have picked up by now that Woolworths has been accused of being a copycat. This has come from a woman by the name of Euodia Roets, who says her hummingbird design was ripped off by the SA retailer. But someone else has come forward, saying that she stole the design herself.

You can read the original attack on Woolworths here.

And they responded with this statement:

CUSHION DESIGN ALLEGATION

SCATTER CUSHION PRINT DESIGN ALLEGATION

The use of birds and hummingbirds is a global trend which inspired our design. Images and photographs of hummingbirds in flight in a similar pose are common, hence the resemblance of the designs. It has inspired retailers all over the world, including South Africa.

We commissioned a Durban artist to interpret this trend in August 2012 and signed off the design in November 2012 for our cushions which we developed as part of our summer range this year. We develop new cushions every summer.

We saw Euodia Roets work at a market in January this year. We consider her a talented artist for which we are always on the look-out. We planned to include her work as part of our artisanal range which supports local artists. We viewed a wide range of her work, one of which was a hummingbird.

We currently support 17 designers through the artisanal range. It is a very small part of our business which we do largely to support local talent. The work, however, has to be commercially viable.

Woolworths goes through a rigorous process to ensure commercial viability. We have to understand all the cost involved and we try hard to structure a fair deal for artists.

Regrettably, we could not find a workable model that made financial sense with Ms Roets. We therefore did not pursue the opportunity further with her.

Woolworths has a proud tradition of supporting local artists and entrepreneurs and helping create sustainable and profitable businesses.

This is a rather unfortunate turn of events. We hope to meet Ms Roets to discuss this issue.

– Brett Kaplan, Managing Director of Clothing and General Merchandise at Woolworths.

But someone else has now come forward, claiming that Euodia Roets stole the image from a photograph taken in 1997, and has been making money off that image.

In an article entitled, ‘Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is…‘ a local blog called Evidence & Reason, posted this interesting tale:

The internet is great for getting the word out there when someone has done something wrong. However, it also makes claims very easy to check up. Sometimes people don’t put two and two together and hypocrisy can become quite evident very quickly. That’s been the case just recently in South Africa. I got a link to this post, where South African designer Euodia Roets calls out Woolworths for the way they stole her design. She gives a lot of details and photo evidence of the similarity between her picture and the one that was then printed on some scatter cushions to sell.

However, it is quite obvious that while the two designs are similar, and neither is particularly original. There are only so many ways one is likely to draw a hummingbird. If you Google “hummingbird” you will see a number of very similar images show up. The first one also happens to look strangely familiar… It turns out that the hummingbird painting Euodia Roets did in 2012 was actually just a copy of a photo taken by R W Scott in 1997. Even more interesting is that although Ms Roets is both selling prints of her painting for $25 and complaining about copyright infringement by Woolworths, the original photo is also copyrighted and not to be used for commercial purposes!

From left to right: The Woolworths scatter cushion, Euodia Roets’ painting, R W Scott’s photograph.
All images copyright their creators.

You can see all three images above and it is very clear that Ms Roets’ painting is identical to the photograph, particularly if you look at the tail markings while there is just a basic resemblance to the scatter cushion. Looking at the images, I don’t believe Woolworths stole her painting. The image is too generic. I do, however, think that Euodia Roets violated the copyright on the photo and failed to credit the photographer.

[read the rest here]

Very interesting.

Have you ever tried googling for ‘hummingbird?’

Guess which hummingbird comes up first?

CLICK HERE and you will get this:

Interesting that, hey?

And you’ll never guess which hummingbird is often used for Google’s Algorithm – entitled ‘Google Hummingbird‘

What do you think of all of this?

Just for the record, the following hummingbird is MINE!

Jokes, I actually got it from freakingnews.com