look familiar?
http://makersmarket.com/sellers/541-chopshopstore

Vaguely..

Wow...how can they even get away with that. Beyond that what the hell ever happened to having an original thought. Looks like a blatant attempt to cash in...morals be damned. As a designer i find this really very sad.

weak

saw these online somwhere, the biter needs to be served. Even down to the "playing with toys".. makes me wanna hurl.

Sad truth: If you do anything remotely cool, somebody else will rip you off, and probably make more money from it, too.

Believe me, I speak from experience...

well... if you go to the boingboing post, here's the explanation - personally, i think it is a blatant rip:

#101 posted by chopshop , May 25, 2008 3:20 PM

i am the one who made the design.

if you follow the portfolio of our site you can actually see the process that led to the silhouetted robots tee. in 2004 we made “desk jockey” and always liked the idea of doing a “junk” tee with a bunch of related stuff on it. This year we did “the internets” collection tee featuring a bunch of internet memes - then we decided to do another and chose robots. since these borrow from pop-culture references we decided on silhouettes for obvious reasons and the symmetry comes from pairing up characters that are related in some way – either by history, personality, shape or some shared something (most people don’t pick up on that).

if had to claim any real inspiration for the idea it would have to be this old poster from HOUSE (http://www.houseind.com/include/getimage.php?id=741) which i had remembered seeing years ago and thinking it really looked great to see all those sils on a single poster like an old sticker set.

anyway, it is what it is and people can and will think what they like.

beyond all this… thank you boingboing for the post. it was fun.


here's desk jockey

It makes me think of that kid in grade school who saw something cool and started ripping it and couldn't stop but thought that since he changed ONE thing it was totally original. "No dude, this character is TOTALLY different. Coolverine has 8 claws, Wolverine only has like 6, so you see it's different. Also his claws are WAY bigger, cmon man you can TOTALLY see the difference, it's original. I also made a whole group for him to be part of the Z-Men, they're a group of heroes like none other! See they're......"

You see where I'm going. How do I know? My best friend was that dud even down to TRACING THE FUCKING CHARACTER AND JUST ADDING MUSCLES AND 1-2 DIFFERENT THINGS ON THE COSTUME! I hated that shit! Stupid friends.

Coolverine!?!

lol @ BD

and not only different--but BETTER. how much?

We asked the Boing Boing guys about this and they didn't seem to care much. Oh well move on.

That's weird, I'd have expected Corey to be right on this.

I exchanged a few emails with the asshole and one of the most interesting things he said when defending himself was this..

"silhouettes are not copyrighted… i checked. make a bunch of sils on a page and arrange them and you get that design. ."

I wish he would just straight up say he ripped it off and I think it would be more acceptable.
He has sent me page long explanations. Here was my response:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Alex Zavaleta <blackeyedc@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 2:39 PM
Subject: Re: wow
To: Thomas Romer <thomas@choppingblock.com>


Typical rip off artist response and of course you checked to see if they could be copyrighted. Can't wait to see the next one you rip-off.

You're right its not the same thing. Yours is a weaker version. Good luck on a career of riding someone's design coat tails.

ps- Hey Shepard Fairey is another easy one to rip off and claim as your own.

blatantly weak... and his reference to the HOUSE piece is comparing apples to oranges.

which i had remembered seeing years ago
Yeah dude, I totally remember that as well!

Me too but they covered the jumbo trooper so we are happy.

Kinda appropriate that they call themselves Chop Shop.

HAHAHA OMG. How can these guys show their faces in public with such an obvious rip off ?!

didn't HMS used to work at/for the chop shop? maybe i'm confusin somewhere else. chop slop.

i like the symmetry of the original s7 design better anyways.

as a designer/artist type meself i don't have a problem with ripping off peoples stuff in homage or in a tongue in cheek sort of way, but its always fairly obvious, but i wouldn't make up a story to justify that its my own thing.

One of "their designs" is called "WeBite"...

I commented on one of their items. I got this email as a response.

chopshopstore's message:

"We have been selling these for 2 years and since the S7 tees got on that show, we suddenly get get this about once a month now. We did an internets tee and then did the same idea with robots. We dropped the colors to avoid cease and desists and they came out the way they did. Right after boing posted them in 08 we found out about the S7 tees as Brian sent us an angry letter. It is an unfortunate situation, but we are not going to stop doing what works and what we really enjoy doing. As an example of this happening yet again, humanshaped robot was doing essentially the same design as weGo and blogged about it (see 3rd post: http://humanshapedrobot.com/goodies.html). We discovered his “Dapper Men” design as a result and wound up printing that last year and it was our best-seller for xmas. I guess there are no new ideas in the world."

They probably thought Flynn's design was Japanese and no one would notice the rip. Oh well, it's just a t-shirt... BTW you think the guys hair cut is original?

Garbage.............
Executed really badly.

They even have the design in the background like a certain wallpaper in a certain store.