Last night, my sister pointed to a developing story about a young British designer, Samantha Beeston, copying/stealing the graphic work of Chicago based designer Lauren Nassef.
Go ahead and read the whole story at:
http://www.book-by-its-cover.com/fineart/a-sad-story-must-read
What intrigues me: she used the internet as a source for her theft, the same internet discovered her scam and is now eating her (online) reputation. Literally.
In 24h googling her name climbed to 65.000 hits, mostly mentioning her plagiarism, links are being bookmarked on tumblr and delicious, re-tweets are filling the life streams, blogposts are trackbacking to the original posts reporting the story (and willing to archive it for future references), posts on famous design blogs -about the price she won with the stolen goodies- are flooded with comments about the case and the prize sponsor TEXPRINT is investigating the case and “will respond appropriately.” She rushed to take her site offline, with little success as the google beast is still caching it, revealing the ultimate proof of her crime.
In an era where Online Reputation has become crucial, Samantha Beeston made a mistake. A big one. One that can ruin her future career. Wandering about the follow-up on this…
update 11/8: the Texprint statement on the case.
[wallie], 5/08/09, 8:53
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