Artist fighting Temu to reclaim her mosaic design

Artist Julie Aldridge's 10-year battle to reclaim mosaic design from the internet Sun 12 Jul 2026 at 8:33am In short: South Australian artist Julie Aldridge says her mosaics have spread across the internet for years, appearing as exact copies, imitations and printed products sold online. She is trying to stop her work being sold as cheap rugs on Temu, saying new listings continue to appear even after other listings are removed. What's next? Legal advocates say Australia's copyright and moral rights laws have struggled to keep pace with the scale and speed of online copying, leaving artists with limited options and lower earnings. When Julie Aldridge's mosaic was bought by an international client in 2013, it seemed like an unlikely success story. The artist, from Port Lincoln, South Australia, had originally created the Sunset Wave design for an exhibition at the Barossa Regional Gallery. It did not sell. "There were no buyers, so I just kept it at my place," Aldridge said. Months later, Aldridge was contacted by a man in the US who wanted to buy the mosaic. She had been surprised how he had found it when she had not posted it online. The answer: through online blogging site Pinterest. The artist had no idea how it ended up there, but her best guess was that artworks from the original Barossa exhibition were put online and eventually made their way to Pinterest. "But I still happened to have the artwork, so I thought, 'Well, why not? I don't make them to keep them.'" The work was sent to California, where it remained in the buyer's home. That was 13 years ago. Since then, different replicas of Sunset Wave have continued to appear online. Aldridge has seen images of the mosaic on quilts and canvases, colouring-in sheets and crochet circles. All without permission, accreditation or compensation. "I'd write to them and say, 'What are you doing? You can't just take someone's work and claim it as your own.'" Now, the artist is fighting a new battle: against Chinese drop-ship company Temu. "It's just next level," Aldridge said. "There was Sunset Wave being made into all types of rugs." Aldridge has reported all of the accounts she found. She said Temu were quick to take those down. "It took weeks but I finally had them all gone; and then lo and behold I found another one on a round rug," she said. While the latest rug seller has also been removed from the site, Aldridge thinks it will only be a matter of time before another knock-off of her work appears. For the artist, it has been upsetting to realise the lack of control she has over her own work, which took years to create after years of learning and honing her craft. "It took real work, years of experience, and then your art is taken away from you. It's just soul destroying, really,"she said. Legal rights of artists Arts Law Centre of Australia executive director Louise Buckingham said the rugs on Temu were a "clear-cut" case of copyright infringement. "It's been replicated, it's an outright copy in each instance where that's happened," she said. Dr Buckingham said even where the mosaic design was altered, either by hand or by AI, it was unlawful and an infringement of an artist's moral rights. She said when a work was altered, destroyed or displayed without proper attribution, it also caused harm to the creator's reputation. However, artist-victims were often deterred from pursuing litigation due to the complexity of copyright law and legal costs. "Artists on average are earning far less annually than many other sectors in society," Dr Buckingham said. "Wide-scale dissemination online really complicates legal processes because our copyright and moral rights law is inherently domestic." Many clients, she said, simply could not afford to take on big tech giants to protect their work. "It's a pretty dire situation for artists to actually enforce those rights." Specifically 2013, specifically Pinterest Digital media expert Teodor Mitew said 2013 marked a time when sites such as Pinterest and Tumblr made little effort to preserve an artist's rights over their content. "They worked on the basis that content was freely re-mixable," Dr Mitew said. "Re-pinning, cropping, screenshotting and re-uploading was how content was shared and appreciated … but attribution was stripped at each step of the way." Dr Mitew said, nowadays, pictures uploaded online were automatically tagged with metadata including location, date and reverse-image-search capabilities that made it easier to trace the picture back to the original upload. He says the AI-generated variants Aldridge is now spotting are a later-stage symptom of countless reproductions of Sunset Wave in the past 13 years. "The picture survived, but the artist disappeared." He said if the image was shared widely enough, it was "probably inevitable" it would have fed into AI-training data. Aldridge said she will continue to monitor Temu and other websites for her work. In a statement, Temu said it "prohibits intellectual property rights infringement on its platform", and that accounts replicating Sunset Wave were "removed promptly following notice and takedown requests submitted through our IP Protection Portal". It said it had added the artist's work to its IP protection database for ongoing monitoring. A Barossa Regional Gallery spokesperson said it could not confirm the "circumstances or any subsequent online reproduction" of Aldridge's artwork. It says its "practices are in line with contemporary legal requirements and industry best practice, including in relation to copyright, intellectual property and artists' rights". The Office for the Arts said it was "working closely with a number of government agencies to ensure the needs and concerns of the cultural and creative sector are heard, as the government determines the best way forward to address concerns around copyright and AI". In a statement, Pinterest said its "policies and enforcement tools have evolved significantly since this case occurred 13 years ago". Pinterest added, "Today, copyright owners can report infringements directly to Pinterest … Creators can also claim their content … through our Content Claiming Portal."