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  Billybop April 4, 2020 at 8:15pm

  probably not much you can do without running up legal costs that you might lose sadly. maybe contact the person who stole your design and threaten them. but would that really achieve anything, there are a lot of unscrupulous feral scum bags around. maybe redesign your own logo again is the only answer. 
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  David Benson April 4, 2020 at 11:06pm

  unless you ar a ltd co it will be hard to do anything it maybe that the other person has been on the go longer than you which could turn the table 
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  Graham Taylor April 5, 2020 at 8:06am

   He's miles away so just forget about it and think of it as a compliment that he copied yours. It really isn't worth the hassle. 
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  Colin Hunt April 5, 2020 at 9:15am

  I don't suppose there is any harm in sending the guy a potite email, explaining that it was your design, keep it light hearted, not threatening and you never know. Certainly not worth getting heavy, life's too short.
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  Andrew Watts April 5, 2020 at 9:42am

  The logo is on the internet, it's not trademarked or images copyrighted. So I don't think it's something that (a) you can do anything about, and (b) shouldn't be too worried about either. It's only a logo and it's far enough away.

  I would send him an email making him aware that you exist, be ok with it, and ask him if anyone gets in touch with him by mistake for you, could he pass on the details.
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  Jonathan Davidson April 5, 2020 at 12:11pm

  Hello Richard,

   

  are you in warwickshire and he in West Sussex, that is quite a way away from you not to cause any issues. I don’t have any set logos etc as sole trader so can’t advise on the use of them  but only the other day I was admiring yours when I saw it on the forum members, ( I won’t be borrowing it). Is it from a logo generator where he has also got it from, or maybe he had it produced from someone who he thought had made it up and paid them to do so, not knowing they’d taken it from elsewhere and it wasn’t original?
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    Richard Matthews > Jonathan Davidson April 5, 2020 at 1:40pm

    Hi

    Yeah ive had it before, someone in Scotland took the design,  solicitor told me not to bother, just infuriates me that people think its ok. Dont know where he got it but website is copyrighted so he may have got it from there or just plain old google
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  Andrew Betteridge April 6, 2020 at 1:29pm

  I’m not quite sure what to say, with time to kill last night I did an internet search and there’s no doubt it’s identical.

  It could be the other guy supplied your artwork to his sign company.

  or he could have paid his sign company to come up with a design or they could have jointly looked through the internet and decided to rip yours off.

  or, unlikely but possible, he might have just got his signs from your sign company.

  Obviously who ever is responsible thought it was far enough away for no one to notice, until the police spotted the connection.

  I don’t think you are going to be able to do anything about it, although it is very annoying it should adversely affect you. It is possibly one of the issues that arises from just using your initials as your trading name rather than your full name or a trade name.

  When I was a kid people used to go to the local printers who had a set of print sets for various trades, my dad’s headed paper had the same house on it as several other of the local builders, but had he commissioned a personalised letter head and paid the printer to produce a set it wouldn’t have hone down well. These days a similar thing happens with Vistaprint producing business stationery and website companies, they use templates and people can end up with similar or near identical stationery and websites, hopefully though well spread out across the country.

  As I said, annoying, but probably not worth pursuing. If however you see photos of your work on other people’s websites and social media that is something that Trading Standards can deal with, photos on websites and social media should show work completed by whoever is using the website and social media to advertise themselves. I saw a local guy advertising using a website that has gang mowers and all sorts of expensive kit in the photos as well as carefully sculpted hedges and the like, all of which were photos collected off other peoples websites and social media, as a Tineye image search soon revealed, he is actually on very dodgy ground doing that.

  Unless there is a deliberate attempt to pass himself off as you, doing work and taking cash payments with people thinking it’s you that did the work, I cannot see the police or trading standards getting involved.

   Andy  
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  1st Garden Maintenance April 21, 2020 at 11:53am

  

  You own the copyright to anything that you write or design. So you have the copyright to a logo you design.

  I looked into this a few years ago because someone decided to copy our terms and conditions. I was advised by a solicitor to write to them in the first place pointing out that I owned the copyright, and if they refused to delete it from their website I would take them to court. The solicitor told me that if they continued to use the T&C's the court would probably order them to pay me around £40,000. in compensation.

  So in your case, send them a letter first saying that they have infringed your copyright and they must delete / remove it within 6 weeks, otherwise you will seek legal action against them. 
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    Richard Matthews > 1st Garden Maintenance April 21, 2020 at 12:19pm

    

    Thanks for your reply

     

    Issue i have is there is no address for this company, they have not been active on social media for 12 months, so they are either not fussed about it or they have closed up.

    It annoys me more than anything, like others have mentoned its far enough away, and they do maintanence not landscaping, and im starting to think its not the worth hassle. I need to speak to a solictor really but currently theres more to worry about