Illustrator Raymond Biesinger's self-defence guide against getting ripped off

Raymond Biesinger is either unlucky or typical, depending on how you look at it: The illustrator has been ripped off nine times since 2005. He kept track of every instance, whether it was a payment that almost cost him a rent payment or a design studio that copied his illustration in the New Yorker for a Hungarian anti-gambling campaign.

On March 1, 2023, at 3:51 PM, he hung up on someone for the first time in his life. On the other end of the call were a vice-president and content director from what he describes as "the continent's largest urban innovation hub"—a publicly-funded nonprofit sitting on 1.5 million square feet of valuable real estate, housing venture capitalists and AI startups. They'd used his illustration of women's anatomy on their online magazine for 1,005 days. When he noticed, they offered him $2,000 and an NDA.