Cathy Aycock says she has had both the best and worst week of her life.
The Charleston artist who founded a small business named Garbage Humans, which sells stickers, enamel pins and other miscellaneous art, has gone viral.
Well, a photo of one of her stickers has.
But that photo, shot by a customer, was not credited to her business when it was shared widely across the internet. It's been seen by millions of people on social media, but the lack of credit back to Garbage Humans cost Aycock brand recognition, income from millions of potential customers and left her with an intellectual property headache.
"Watching this spiral completely out of my control so quickly was very hard to come to terms with, but it feels really great to know that something I've created really resonates with so many people," she said.
The viral photo features one of Aycock's newest stickers, which reads "Employees must stop crying before returning to work." It's a play on the ubiquitous stickers seen in most restaurant bathrooms, admonishing employees to wash their hands before returning to work.
The photo of Aycock's sticker received 35,000 shares after it was posted on Facebook on Jan. 3 by a customer. Aycock said she did not want to disclose his name.
It has since been shared by Instagram, Twitter and Facebook account holders with millions of followers. It even earned a spot on the front page of Reddit, a popular social news aggregation website. The Post and Courier reached out to several social media users who have shared the photo but has received no response.
When Aycock realized the image of her sticker had gone viral, she tried to contain the damage.
She messaged the customer who took and shared the photo of her sticker and asked him to credit her with its creation, but the customer refused. Meanwhile, many credits have been given out to false sources, also omitting the initial customer who took the photo.
False reports about the sticker being posted in a Starbucks' employee bathroom, in a hospital bathroom and even in a strip club bathroom circulated the internet. Untrue stories were created surrounding the sticker, most likely created by Instagram account holders to cause a stir and generate more likes. (Many Instagram accounts earn revenue based on the number of likes each post receives.)
"Unfortunately with Instagram, the longer a post sits uncredited, the more people see it and share it without credit," Aycock said.
According to intellectual property lawyer Alex Summers of the Charleston- and Santa Barbara-based firm Online Trademark Attorneys, the customer who took and shared the photo of Aycock's sticker was within his rights.
"(Aycock) created a sticker, not the image that is getting the likes," said Summers. "The copyright at issue here belongs to whoever took the photo, not the artist of the sticker."
She added that in order to have a copyright infringement claim, there needs to be both a valid copyright and proof of an actionable copying, which Aycock does not possess. It might be different, for instance, if someone re-posted a direct photo from her website instead of their own photo.
In this case, legally, there is no obligation to tag Garbage Humans.
Yet morally, many of Aycock's fans believe there should be. That's why a lot of them have been tagging Garbage Humans in the posts that they've seen.
That may be helping her business. Aycock estimates she's lost out on thousands of sales and thousands of dollars, but her sales have still recently risen more than 500 percent.
Karissa O'Keefe, a fellow South Carolina art business owner and fan of Aycock's, is one of the crusading fans helping her to get some exposure throughout this situation.
"As a fellow business owner, I understand that in the age of Instagram, it’s really hard to get exposure just through making posts on your own account," O'Keefe said. "When a really huge account shares a post but without credit, you’re missing out on all these people who could be potential customers. That’s one reason I’ve been emotionally invested in it for Cathy."
Aycock said her fans' responses have been nothing but heartwarming.
"My followers have been so amazing through all of this, because they are so loyal and they take time out of their day to reach out on any post they see and try to lead people back to me," said Aycock. "They are the only reason I've made money off of this entire situation."
It has also opened her eyes to the internet and how so much we see online can be deceiving.
"It never occurred to me that the things we see when scrolling Instagram might not be what we think they are," Aycock said. "But I'll be more mindful of that now."
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