How AI scraping left this designer's entire catalogue copied

Imagine building a business for 15 years, only to find thousands of copies of your own work being sold by strangers you've never met. That's exactly what happened to Sydney designer Warwick Levy, and his fight to stop it reveals a gap in copyright protection that AI is only widening.

Levy operates Lonely Kids Club, which is a graphic T-shirt brand created using collaboration with local artists. From 2025 until this year, Levy came across thousands of exact copies of his designs on Temu.

The problem did not end there because he claims that his whole collection of 4,000 products got replicated along with his descriptions, brand name, product illustrations, and even photos. This led him to believe that someone used an AI tool to scrap his entire website.

Although any original work is automatically covered under Australian copyright law, establishing an infringement is no easy task. Levy finally ended up having to bypass copyright completely and leverage his registered trademark for the "Lonely Kids Club" name to have the majority of listings taken down in bulk, because the fake sellers were actually using his brand name directly in their listings.

According to Levy, Temu's reporting forms kept on failing or not even loading halfway through, while any emails he sent to them didn't get any response at all.

However, it was once he started filing trademark-based bulk complaints when the copycat listings started getting taken down.

Levy's case isn't isolated. It follows other Australian designers accusing major platforms of enabling design theft, some of it also linked to AI scraping tools.

That makes the timing notable: the Albanese government is currently weighing reforms that could give AI companies broader legal rights to scrape Australian content for training their models. Levy calls that prospect "devastating" for creators like him, especially since he says no generative AI was used in any of his own designs.

A Temu spokesperson said the platform bans sellers from listing infringing products and confirmed it removed the listings after Levy reported them through its IP Protection Portal, adding his brand to its monitoring database.