A T-Shirt Maker stole my Site's Logo!

And now they're making money off my hard work

Several years ago I created a fansite for my favorite band and movie, The Blues Brothers:

Blues Brothers Central (www.bluesbrotherscentral.com)

After a year of using a picture from one of their albums as my site logo, I decided to create something that would be instantly recognizable as my site, rather than using someone else's work. My site was becoming very popular and I realised it was time to create something unique.

The official Blues Brothers logo is this:

It was created by John Belushi's wife Judy, and is trademarked. So obviously I didn't want to use that as my site logo.

After several days and around 25 designs, I came up with this:

It looks nothing like the original, and fans know right away what it is now. I've been using this logo for the last 2 years, everyone seems to like it. Now I stress, I'm not a graphic designer. I'm a PHP/MySQL programmer, so creating this was a huge achievement for me, and it's still something I'm very proud of.

Then recently a Spanish member of my site sent me this scan from a local music catalog:

I couldn't believe it, they had stolen my website's logo and were selling it on t-shirts!
I found their website, www.discoplay.es, and checked if it was posted on there. It was:

I immediately sent them an angry email:
...Why are you using my website logo on your t-shirts? You did not ask me for permission to sell my work! The logo is my work entirely, I designed it myself and you are not allowed to put it on your t-shirts!!!...
I also included links to my website and some examples of where it was used. To date I have sent 5 emails, and have had exactly 0 replies.

Although my site deals with someone else's intellectual property (Dan Aykroyd and the Estate of John Belushi own the rights), they are good friends of Blues Brothers Central, and have asked for my help several times over the years. I was even given a VIP pass to the 25th Anniversary DVD Launch in Hollywood! Some of the Blues Brothers Band are members of my site, as are several actors from the films. Even John Landis, the director of 'The Blues Brothers' movie, knows who I am.

This company has stolen my hard work and is trying to make money off it. I've seen it happen to photographers on Flickr, but I never expected it would happen to me!

For the record, my site's logo has evolved over the last few years. This is how it looks now:


I can't sue them, I can't make them stop, so all I can do is post it on Digg and hope that if I'm lucky, someone from Discoplay will notice. Because they sure aren't noticing my emails.

Update: May 31st 2007
Well, nobody dugg the story, but I did discover another site doing the same thing: www.evilmoon.webd.pl

I've emailed them also. At least these ones tried slightly modifying it first, but it's still as obvious as you can get.

Also, for anyone wondering where my inspiration came from, it's right here:

That's the actual frame from the movie which inspired me to try a "Warning: Blues Brothers ahead" style for the logo.