KAWS awarded nearly $1M for knockoffs of its works

➡️ Read the full article: The artist KAWS will soon have an extra $900,000 thanks to a legal victory over two companies in Singapore and a man named Dylan Joy An Leong Yi Zhi, who were producing counterfeit dolls, figurines, canvases, and neon lights. KAWS allegedly warned Leong and the companies in a letter written in 2020, according to court documents filed in the Southern District of New York. KAWS began legal action against them in 2021. The artist claimed that Leong and the businesses infringed on his copyright by producing numerous products that featured KAWS’s signature Companion skull design. The artist estimated that the total value of these works was above $63 million. One of the businesses boasted in court documents about how cheap their “custom hand-reworked reproductions“ of KAWS’s works were compared to the artist’s original figurines and sculptures. As a result of Leong and his companions’ pub