A digital artist recovered a seven-figure sum after thousands of online stores stole his artwork - and now he's bought a house with the cash.

Jonas Jodicke, 29, fought a six-year battle with online art thieves but got back the money with help of a team of lawyers.

His art had been used and printed on various items such as T-shirts then sold to the public without credit or payment.

Jonas, who is from Berlin, Germany "almost gave up" on his dream of becoming an artist after seeing his work being sold everywhere for years."

But one day on holiday in Bangkok, Thailand, Jonas saw a print of his work being sold on the street.

This was a turning point for the young artist and he decided to tackle the problem.

Jonas started to work with a team of 16 lawyers from Edwin James, a firm that specialises in removing counterfeit from online platforms.

And after six years of legal battle, Jonas and his lawyers manage to stop more than 2,400 online shops from printing and selling his work.

The bust was described by the firm as "the biggest case of art theft they had ever dealt with."

Jonas has been creating art since he was a child but his career kicked off in his early 20s.

He said: "My art really took off when I painted a series of Yin and Yang inspired animals called 'Symbols of Life.'"

"These paintings depicted two animals of a kind, one representing Yin and the other Yang, or light and dark, death and life and so on."

"The Yin and Yang series went viral, especially on Instagram, which made my online audience jump from a few thousand followers to around 100,000 followers in a very short time-span."

"With the newfound reach, my business grew but so did the problems with art theft."

"Prior to going viral, people had sometimes uploaded my art to DeviantArt and claimed it as theirs but that was about it."

According to Jonas, a Chinese retailer named fshion.me approached him in 2015 with a deal to distribute and license his work to some of the biggest brands in the world.

Jonas accepted the offer which he said had an advance payment and a commission on future sales, but this is when the "art theft went completely out of hand."

Jonas said: "After I started working with fshion.me my art first appeared on all the websites they claimed to work with but it didn’t stop there."

"Suddenly my art was sold by almost every online shop you could imagine."

"It also spread way beyond the few websites fshion.me had claimed to work with, leaving me with the impossible task to fight an ever-growing hydra of counterfeit, where any product I got to take down through a DMCA notice spawned 10 new items elsewhere.''"

Jonas tried to contact fshion.me to claim royalties from online websites that had ripped the designs, but his emails were left unanswered.



One of Jonas' most famous work "The Galaxy Wolf" was being sold by resellers Alibaba and Aliexpress, with some listings showing thousands of sales."



He said: "The amount of money that was made with my art is obscene."

"On Alibaba and Aliexpress I could see how many items were sold on a singular listing."

"There were listings that had tens of thousands of sales and the number of listings were also in the thousands."

"If you combine all the different platforms, products and also physical stores that my art was sold at illegally, I estimate the actual damages to be up to a hundred million dollars."

The task at hand became a mammoth and ever-growing battle that he could not keep up with - so he gave up and focused on his own sales to trusted distributors.

In 2018, Jonas went viral online after getting in a Twitter spat with Aaron Carter, the brother of Backstreet Boy singer Nick Carter, over the singer's use of one of his designs.

Jonas worked with a law firm that took the case on a pro bono basis, meaning they only would make money if they successfully recovered funds from Aaron Carter.

Eventually, the singer, who has now passed, had to pay £9,700 ($12,500), which was split between Jonas and the law firm.

He said: "The Aaron Carter incident was the first time I really fought back, not only by posting about it online but also by taking legal action."

"The legal case took around two years and was a lot of back and forth, which is why we finally decided to settle the case."

"This incident showed me that it was possible to fight for my art and recover some damages."

In 2022, intellectual property lawyers at Edwin James IP approached Jonas offering to help him with his ongoing art theft by online retailers.

The law firm found a way to take the companies to court in the United States and less than a year after taking on the case, they were able to temporarily cease their trading and negotiate payment for the illicit use of art.

Jonas said: "I could have never imagined that I was ever going to see any of the money the thieves had made with my art over all these years."

"So when Edwin James IP sent me their first batch of counterfeit shops they had found, containing around 2,000 such shops, I was sceptical, to say the least."

"We applied for US copyright certificates for all my artworks and they had a team of 16 lawyers and specialists work on my case."

Now a year on, the first round of recovery payments were issued and Jonas couldn't believe it when he heard the figure.

He said: "A year later, in early 2023, Edwin James IP had their first meeting with me where they let me know how much money they had been able to recover so far."

"I almost fell from my chair when they told me the amount and had tears in my eyes, as did the founder of Edwin James IP and his wife, who had joined the Zoom meeting because they said it was the biggest case of art theft they had ever dealt with in their firm."

Jonas said that he can't disclose the actual figure recovered by the law firm but he has been able to buy his own home with the cash.

David Denholm, 46, the managing director of Edwin James IP said: "This case was particularly big, but that's unusual, you know, in terms of size."

"But what's not unusual, is the amount of people out there doing counterfeit and the amount of artists that are getting ripped off. That's for sure."

"It can become very demoralising as an artist and also just unmanageable because now, what are you doing? You're just spending all your days, sending in forms, instead of creating your art."

"We definitely have a lot of artists that have said, [they've] almost thought about giving up because you can sort of get a little bit of embroiled in it sometimes."

"You know, it's not an easy gig being an artist. So I think I think it's quite inspiring."

The law firm continues to take on many more online retailers selling Jonas' artwork and the case is expected to be ongoing for at least another year.

David added: "So it was it was 2400 on the first launch and then we've subsequently easily found another 600 on this second set of cases that we're putting through so we're beyond three thousand now."