After winning a case against two companies in Singapore and a man named Dylan Joy An Leong Yi Zhi, who were making fake dolls, figurines, canvases, and neon lights, the artist KAWS will soon have an extra $900,000. Documents filed in court in the Southern District of New York say that in 2020, KAWS sent Leong and the businesses a letter telling them to stop doing what they were doing. In 2021, KAWS filed a case against them. The artist said that Leong and the companies had broken his copyright by making hundreds of works, many of which had KAWS's famous Companion with a skull face on it. The artist said that these pieces were worth more than $63 million when sold together.
In court papers, it was shown that one of the companies even bragged about being able to make "custom hand-reworked reproductions" of KAWS's works and how much cheaper they are than the artist's original figurines and sculptures. This public statement was enough for the court to decide that Leong and his friends "knew they were going to sell fake KAWS goods." Kaws's legal team, which includes the lawyer Aaron Richard Golub, gave the court 154 counterfeit works as proof of copyright infringement. They also said that these works hurt his reputation and "chill the market for his original work because buyers fear accidentally buying a counterfeit," which is a constant problem for the artist, who reportedly spends up to $40,000 a year on counterfeit identification.
Jean Dubreil