Where would you draw the line?

As most freelancers, I work hard for a living. Helveticons took me over 600 hours to create, so I can't even begin to describe what I felt when the first purchase came through. Standing on your own feet makes you evaluate what to spend your hours on.

At the time I was working on Helveticons Extras, more iconsets in the same category started to arrive. I've always felt good about competition since it makes you work even harder on your own goals. The competition also seemed to aim for a different market segment than I did.

Shortly after releasing Helveticons Extras, one of the rivaling icon sets also released their second edition. I found this through some users on twitter comparing my iconset to his and pointing out some obvious similarities.



Strangely enough I had never really reflected about the similarities between the icon sets, but this made me look into it. So, I purchased these icon sets and made a table which compares Helveticons and Vital Vector. The result was rather disappointing, I felt almost breathless while looking at the comparison.

The reason I'm writing this and showing the comparison for public display is that I simply cannot tolerate anyone taking my icons and then re-selling them at a lower price. I have no sacks of gold for lawyers, nor time for such a lengthy process, but this clearly is a breach of my license agreement.

Here's a link to the comparison table that shows a side by side (and fill) comparison between the sets.
(updated 12:00 / 03-27-2010 with 10 more icon comparisons now a total of 80 icons)