UK artist Hannah Turner was shocked by the image of a ceramic flamingo-shaped egg cup that showed up on her screen.
She took in its green eyes, the pattern of the feathers, its thin pink legs and its overall shape. She felt recognition.
The product she was seeing was being sold for A$5 by a discount variety chain more than 15,000kms from her studio in England’s south-west, where she first created her own ceramic egg-cup flamingo, which sells for $62.
Until that moment, Turner had no idea that Australian retailer The Reject Shop was selling such a product, as part of its Jungle Animal Egg Cup Assorted range. Shock gave way to anger, before she wrote to the retailer, accusing it of selling something that copied her design.
“It’s crafts versus capitalism, really,” Turner told Guardian Australia.
“If you want good designers out there designing things you need to support them … and understand why it costs a little bit more.”
‘Small artists just don’t have the budget’
Turner said other ceramics artists had experienced instances of large retailers selling imitations of their products, and she wanted consumers to understand how this affected small businesses.
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She had raised the egg cups with The Reject Shop last week, after a customer let her know she had seen the similar product in the stores – which are known for their array of cheap homewares, cleaning products and craft supplies.
The company reported $471.7m of sales in the second half of 2024, with a gross profit of $196.3m.
In her email, seen by the Guardian, Turner asked the company to “please remove and destroy all of these goods and show us proof, and also please provide us with details of who you purchased them from so we can take legal action”.
In response, The Reject Shop told Turner that her email “does not identify any legal rights you may have in Australia to justify the requests”.
But the company also said that “as a gesture of good faith and without any admission of liability” – it would not import any further units of the egg cup.
“TRS currently has approximately 1,350 units of the Flamingo Product remaining, which it estimates will be sold through by the end of January 2026,” The Reject Shop said in its email to Turner, which the Guardian has seen.
“We trust this resolves the matter.”
Turner, who is based in Bradford on Avon, said she designed all of her products herself. The prototypes were created at her studio, and the goods then manufactured in small batches by a company in Sri Lanka.
She said she wanted financial compensation from The Reject Shop, but was unsure about taking legal action against the company.
“It makes me really angry because small artists just don’t have the budget to pursue these companies,” she said.
A Reject Shop spokesperson said ensuring product compliance was a priority.
“We also take stakeholder feedback into consideration in the ongoing review of our product offering and merchandising practices,” they said.
“After reviewing Ms Turner’s request, as a gesture of good faith and in acknowledgment of her concerns, we undertook to not re-order the product.”
Copyright infringement
In Australia, original creative works are automatically protected by copyright law, which applies to artists in the UK because both countries are signatories of the international Berne Convention for copyright protection.
An artist can claim copyright infringement in Australia as long as a “substantial part” of an original work has been used without their permission and without a relevant defence. A claimant also needs to establish the person actually copied their work.
But making a claim could be “tricky” because the “substantial part” threshold was subjective and not defined by the law, according to the Arts Law Centre’s chief executive, Dr Louise Buckingham.
She said the centre received inquiries every day from artists navigating copyright infringement – many of which involve cases of large retailers imitating their designs.
“It’s really difficult to take action because it’s expensive and time consuming,” Buckingham said.
Prof Andrew Christie, an intellectual property expert at the University of Melbourne’s law school, said Turner could potentially make a copyright infringement claim over the images printed on the egg cups as long as she could prove she was the creator.
But experts say AI’s ability to trawl the web for designs is making it harder for artists to protect their original work.
Speaking generally, Dr Sarah Hook, a senior lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney’s law school, said AI can be used to identify things that can be easily reproduced.
“But just because something was made by AI doesn’t absolve them of any copyright liability,” Hook said.
Dr Daniela Simone, from Macquarie University’s law school, said while there “seems to be a close similarity” between Turner’s egg cup and the one sold by The Reject Shop, it was “certainly not a clearcut situation”.
“What makes this really difficult is ideas are not protected by copyright, only the expression of ideas,” she said.
“There’s only so many ways in which you can represent a flamingo.”
