Only a few days ago we were commenting on the success of designer boutique stores, like Giant Robot and Toy Tokyo. Now the Kelly/Goldman scandal has brought to the forefront the cutthroat nature of the design business, where one idea can be immensely profitable be being endlessly ripped-off. Two sites are devoed to showing examples of design theft, URBAN COUNTERFEITERS and you thought we wouldn’t notice.

The first one specializes in Urban Outfitters rip-offs. The second casts its nets a bit wider as with this Nissan/Graffitti artist appropriation. We would tell you the name of the graffitti artist, but You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice had a bandwidth crash before we could check it.

Anyway, it makes us feel very guilty about this totally bitchin’ OTHER Felix the Cat shirt we bought the other day, but you can actually glimpse some of our OFFICIAL, lawfully acquired Felix merch in the background. We couldn’t pass up a t-shirt that featured Felix the Pirate Cat, come on now.

We do feel increasingly guilty about all the free shit we get. And don’t get us wrong, we get an awful lot of legit free shit — and sometimes non legit free shit, too. We’re trying to make a concerted effort to actually buy things we like now and then, however, esp. CDs. However, buying CDs is pretty pointless because we don’t have any room for them. Okay, howabout downloading it from iTunes, then? That’s a fine idea except for all the DRM, but we know how to get around that. But they still don’t make it easy — sometimes you can’t find the whole album, or the artists aren’t there, or whatever. Record companies need to get hip — the only people who want pieces of plastic in their homes any more are the same people who wanted slabs of vinyl 15 years ago.