Community. This is what crowdSPRING is truly about. We are a community that celebrates creativity, possibility, and fair competition. We are built to support our users and provide them with professional opportunity and value. Of course community is a delicate thing – even a strong community, built on common interests, support, and mutual respect, can be fragile and easily damaged. Bad behavior by its members can have a corrosive effect and, ultimately, degrade the quality and value that the community provides.

One of the ways in which we have built strong community is by providing industry-leading features and policies for protecting the intellectual property of our users. We also take pride in providing great customer service, which includes replying promptly to reports of IP violations and settling disputes fairly. Last fall we started providing educational materials to Creatives via the Tips tab. In January, our community contributed to this effort, when we collaboratively developed and adopted a Standards of Conduct for Creatives working on crowdSPRING, to codify behaviors that are not acceptable when participating on the site.

But, in spite of these efforts, since this past January we have seen a steady increase in reported IP violations. These reports include the unauthorized use of stock art, inclusion of offensive material, outright plagiarism, and (possibly the worst of all) the copying of submitted concepts. Too often we are receiving reports that one Creative has “stolen” the concept first submitted by another. Many of you have been victim to this harmful practice, and some of you are guilty of engaging in it. Since launch we have tracked this trend and we are considering ways we can reduce the number of incidents. Take a look at the charts below showing IP violations data for January through July. The first one shows the steep increase in the raw number of IP Violation reports since the beginning of the year. The trend is disturbing, yes, but considering that we have also grown dramatically since January in terms of projects and participating Creatives, perhaps not as bad as it appears at first glance:

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