The reason for creating this lens is purely educational. As you might know there are many services in the internet that allow you to upload designs and have them printed on t-shirts and other merchandize. You can then buy these products for yourself or even sell them to other people for a profit. One can find many sites that are promoting such services; the most popular are Cafepress, Zazzle and Spreadshirt.
Occasionally when you try to upload a design you might get a note that your design is violating someone else's trademark, copyright or it is plain unacceptable for some other reason. Basically this is called red flagging of you design. These companies have the right to do so since this way the protect themselves and you form possible lawsuits and other unpleasant encounters with lawyers. Many times this banning has nothing to do with the design itself but everything with the text that they ask you to accompany the design and describe the design. Such text if it leads to sales can also be considered a violation of a trademark.
During the last few months with one of these services I have a number of designs banned. As I said these companies have the right to "de facto" red flag a design so in many cases I don't know the real reasons of the banning and if there has been a violation of a trademark, if such violation will hold in a court or if there was a violation at all and the design was banned for other reasons.
Most of my banned designs are parodies, something that it is acceptable under the law but still doesn't help since even in a parody case someone can sue an artist for his work and the issue will have to be resolved in court.
This is a list of my banned designs that you can't purchase. If you are interested to see my other designs please visti my site. There are more than 350 designs available in a number of products,
This list will update when a design gets banned at Cafepress.
CAUTION
Caution with CAUTION
This design has been banned, as have all designs that carry the word "CAUTION". Apparently someone had trademarked the word "CAUTION" and nobody can use it again in a garment. BEST BUY
The best of the BEST
Well it is clear why this one had been banned. I thought since there was a number of other products around in the Internet selling similar designs and thecompany is not in the garment business this would be safe. I was wrong. I even wrote to Best Buy but they would not allow me to have this design printed. SPACE INVADERS
Invadasion of a trademark?
I created this parody of the now archaic game "space invaders" It was banned in a matter of hours though there are still numerous designs up at the particular service site similar to this one. Though I never got an answer to why this has been banned I assume they didn't like what I wrote at my descriptions. A last note, I searched at the trademark office and it looks like the trademark for clothing has been abandoned years ago. BUND DEUTSCHEL MADEL
Glamorizing of war criminals?
Actually this design was not banned because of a copyright or trademark infringement but because someone called and said it glamorizes the actions of Hitler by having a swastika at the license plate of the bike. Can yous see it?This t-shirt printing service sales several images of German Second World War subjects including Nazi generals, like Romel, Nazi planes, tanks, propaganda posters and other swastika like symbols, but it is my 80X80 pixels swastika on a license plate that bothered them!.
I replied with a letter to CP and I also posted it to the forums, asking them to use common sense and see that this is a drawing of a sexy girl and not a Nazi propaganda material but the forum was locked by a moderator and later they even banned me for the forums for 2 weeks claiming I was starting fights.
You can draw your own conclusions....
At least at a phone conversation the said they will reinstate the drawing with the swastika removed. A new version of this design is now available without the swastika but with an eagle at this location. Who knows for how long it will be up?
UPDATE: For one more time this designs was taken down. So I called the Cafepress service and I spoked to a really polite and nice person who reviewed the design right while I was at the phone. He knew the history about the swastika on the license plate and himself couldn't see why it was flagged again since the swastika was removed. He then re-instated the drawing. He was very helpfully and I really appreciated the way he handled the case.
(by 5 people)
