About a month ago, I won my very first copyright infringement lawsuit in federal court and the judge ordered I be awarded the $384,997 in damages, which is the amount they made off my Titania Fairy Wings design- but I'm told I'm unlikely to ever actually get the money awarded to me.
If you have a PACER account you can view or download all the available case files here:
https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/59491543/Jarman_v_The_Partnerships_and_Unincorporated_Associations_Identified_in_Schedule_A
I've uploaded the most important ones to my Google Drive here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1OAwS-TFVNrNgzdsLiz-X6N4nJ0bnpCbU?usp=sharing
I've procrastinated writing about it because it still pains me to think about how much money these copycats made off my design that I'm told I'm unlikely to get, because we got stuck with a judge who didn't grant the full injunction like they normally do.
I'll start from the beginning
My lawsuit was filed in August 2025 against a couple dozen different Amazon sellers all infringing on my Titania Fairy Wings design, as a Schedule A copyright infringement case.
I'd been working on gathering the links and all the evidence for over a year already by then, spending many nights & weekends collecting links and screenshots because I had heard that these were fairly easy to win as long as the infringement was real, and that they were fairly quick as well.
To file a Schedule A lawsuit like this, to my knowledge the below has been true:
• The work must be registered with the US Copyright Office
• The artist lives in the US and the infringers are selling to US customers
• The infringers are located outside of the US
• There must be several different sellers all infringing on the same IP on a single platform
• The platform must be one that participates - currently Amazon and Walmart do
*I was recently told some firms are now able to sue just 1 overseas seller if they have 10,000 sales or more per month which is a change from originally needing between 20 - 50 different sellers.
Since overseas infringers and counterfeiters have become such a giant problem to US artists, US courts allow overseas IP infringers to be sued all at once if the case fits the above points when the platform is one that participates in this program.
Currently I know Amazon and Walmart are viable, there may be others but Amazon is where my infringements were happening.
I knew sites like Alibaba had art thieves selling copies of my wings, but a couple years ago they started popping up on Amazon. They were all copies of my Titania wings (my original wings shown at top).
Here are 2 of the case Exhibit pages comparing mine with the counterfeit items:
Below is one of the copycat's listings.
Obviously, I can't compete with a price point of only $48 dollars for my hand made, US made version I offer. My sales definitely suffered due to the unfair competition.
There were others that actually folded in the middle, with a big ugly metal bar in the middle of the upper panels, and some of them flapped as well which also impacted my ability to sell the flapping mechanisms.
AmyMark and Heyseri were just two of those:
There were at least 10 different sellers selling the wearable fairy wing copies, and some were at the top of the page of featured listings by 2023.
Unfortunately by the time the lawsuit was actually filed, most of the wearable wing listings had deactivated or sold out and weren't considered viable to the legal team. Only Fodtahee was still selling and became a defendant in the case. But, at least the wearable wing listings are no longer available.
Some of them I sent DMCA removal notices for that Amazon removed and the seller later sent a false counter notice for that got it reinstated, some of them Amazon refused to remove in the first place, so after a while I gave up trying DMCAs and decided to try litigation since there were so many sellers.
The other item was a temporary tattoo made of my own photo shown in the Exhibit A image I showed you further up, the Titania Fairy Wings in Light Green. They were tinted purple - pink and the edges were altered, and a curved line added to the top and bottom. That version had been around online without my permission for a long time & I'd tried hard to get them removed, but eventually manufacturers found it and decided to turn it into temp tattoos.
These are the photos they used in most of the listings:
HanaKin, above, was the one with the highest amount of sales of the infringing tattoos - just over $200K!
I guess I should be selling temporary tattoos! I'd probably need to get them produced in bulk because I don't know that people would be willing to pay the amount I'd need to charge if I tried making some myself on my Cricut at home.
From hope to disappointment
Because the judge didn't freeze all the Amazon accounts, once the sellers were served & notified of the lawsuit they simply drained their accounts.
There was some sort of restriction but I'm not completely clear on who's accounts were restricted, in what way and for how long.
Whatever limited freeze they implemented it did lead to a few settlements at first from the smaller sellers in the 2025 - 26 winter season. Since they were settled I can't tell you how much or from who, but it was just enough to carry me through a really crappy winter for sales.
It helped me survive, still not enough to get needed dental work done, take a desperately needed vacation or start up a retirement plan. Maybe if the economy for artists and luxury goods were better that would have been an extra bonus I could have applied towards those things, but in the end it really just replaced the sales I should have been making.
I thought that 'limited freeze' I was told about was still in effect by the time the data subpoenaed from Amazon was finally provided and the hearing happened in May. I really thought I'd finally get some substantial relief from all this IP theft, but before the final judgement I was told that 'essentially zero' was recoverable at the time.
The only way the money is recoverable, is if the platforms have it in their accounts to transfer since these are all overseas shops and pretty much untouchable if their funds aren't in a US platform like Amazon.
That's also why I hadn't said anything publicly about this and kept it quiet for a couple years while working on the case. You don't want the copycats to take all their money out & close shop before the lawsuit is finalized and before you can access the funds owed to you.
Many of them are manufacturing items themselves.
The lawsuit files with the seller names are always under seal as well in these Schedule A cases, unless they've been ruled guilty of infringement. That's why if you look up my case on PACER there are quite a few pages that are all blacked out.
I was gutted.
I had allowed myself to look forward to and plan for having enough to finally take a vacation - we haven't taken a real one or traveled anywhere since 2016 - to create new products, fix my teeth, to invest in costuming for photos and to be able to support other artists by purchasing their art, to donate to all the causes important to me, etc. and now that wasn't happening.
Learning exactly how much was made from only the top 5 sellers when I'd found nearly 50 of them throughout those couple years in total really dumped my mood in the trash. Nearly $385K. God dammit.
Of course, the attorneys take a big cut out of that, that's pretty standard since this was done on contingency so I didn't have to pay anything out of pocket but it STILL would have been a life changing amount of money. I could have possibly even put a down payment on a house, which I pretty much gave up on ever being able to do again after losing my first one during the market crash when my marriage & business imploded.
What I wasn't expecting was for the judge to order other platforms like Paypal, Wish.com, and others to freeze their funds as well although I'm told by my attorneys that there wasn't a lot of hope for that. We don't even know if they're using those platforms and they may be under a completely different name, unidentifiable.
Apparently there's a small amount Amazon was able to collect as a few of them still have some other listings active, but after the attorneys' cut I won't even get 5 figures.
Whether those listings will stay active, or if I'll get paid more later I'm not sure & can’t get a definitive answer. I was told that a lot of sellers prefer to abandon their shops rather than pay.
I know I should be grateful that I got anything at all, and I'm glad that at least the wearable wings are no longer on their site. But there are still 5 of the tattoo listings up from the dismissed defendants, which I had previously been told wouldn't happen. At the very least I thought there wouldn't be anyone selling these things on Amazon anymore but even that expectation was apparently too much.
I'm also now finding a different version of the same design in temp tattoos (below) and don't even know if I can do anything about them yet :/
This is not the only site selling them, I also saw them on Temu because of course.
That said,... anyone have leads for a good deal on skin safe, custom temporary tattoos?
All of this has really made me re-evaluate what I'm doing and what I've been offering. The market has changed, people are struggling and selling high end fairy wings is harder than it ever was before. So maybe I need to think smaller until things improve.
Anyway thank you, again, always, for your support. I'm making this free even if I require a free subscription for a night to make sure I'm okay with the information revealed before I post it elsewhere. I'm trying to put together a video, which also shows the comparison between mine and theirs, and the flapping motions of both.
And by the way, below are the oldest records I can find of the finished Titania design. I took a screenshot of a real life set as well as my Second Life vendor for the SL version of Titania wings, both made in 2007.
