The Urban Outrage story runs deeper - who did it first?

It's the story that never ends, now Regretsy weighs in on the Urban Outrage. There's lots of previous heart-within-a-state/country examples out there, like the James Avery Texas Necklace depicted above. When the Truche design copied by Urban Outfitters story tweeted around so much that it became a trending topic, Helen Killer felt a twinge of something wrong.

But there was something about this story that just wasn’t gelling for me. I tried to write it up several times yesterday, egged on by a persistent stream of email and tweets from outraged readers, begging for the Regretsy Thugs to put the smackdown on Urban Outfitters. I just couldn’t pull the trigger.

She then shows us just how many designers on Etsy have little countries and states with hearts in them. By golly, there's loads.

That’s pretty damning. But what part of the design is proprietary? The shape of a state or country isn’t really something anyone can lay claim to. So you’d have to conclude that it’s the addition of the heart that makes it her design.
And that’s where this starts getting complicated.

Urban Outfitters have been in hot water for design theft before, so that's not new. But then neither does the design of a heart within a state seem to be. I found one here with the heart in Texas which seems a logical extension from The star in Texas. If you look around Etsy, you'll find plenty more.