Well that’ll change how all those tshirt on-demand sites are doing business. The time of third-party vendors putting their head in the sand claiming not to have any control over what is posted on their platform is coming to a close. Good for HD.
Nah, it’ll just change their terms of service to be more clear and obvious about copyright rules. As in, if they come after us, we’ll come after you.
Not sure how well that will work. Tends to be the manufacturer, not the buyer who is infringing. Just because someone gives you a picture doesn’t give you the right to reproduce. Photo labs are pretty strict about this.
I suspect it’ll be worded something like “… by uploading images to be printed, you affirm that you are the copyright holder of the image or have permission from the copyright holder. Any claims of copyright infringement will be the responsibility of the uploader…”
It won’t be ironclad, as you said, they hold some responsibility. Things like Harley Davidson are obvious, and easy for a worker in a print shop to spot. An art doodle lifted from IG or a Google search, very much less so.
Two hard core copyright violation firms are Disney and NFL.
Why they have not shut down places like Etsy yet baffles me.
The went after a flea market vendor here locally, and yet their products are flaunted all over the Internet.
Only answer I got is that they must have made a franchise deal of some sort. Dunno.
There actually is a franchise deal with Cricut that sells you Disney designs with limits on volume of no more than so many a month or some sort, and there are several others like that that they sell as well. And those who buy the designs would be selling the result on etsy or flea markets,
Etsy is not making the product, it’s the end users making it. I’m sure there are hundreds of infringers being C&D’d every day, and there are likely that many new ones popping up.
Disney licensing is a nightmare to get - from what I understand, at least.
The Disney stuff is interesting because a lot of the copyright protection stuff has lapsed, or never was, in our lifetime. For example, Aladdin. Cinderella. Beauty and the Beast. Etc.
Folk have gone back to the original that Disney appropriated and built from that but then they go through it with a fine comb looking for tiny variations from the original that are in the Disney version but not the original and added to the new one, and land like a ton of bricks on that.
There have been several non Disney versions of Peter Pan but there was great effort to avoid any nuance that Disney added.
Disney doesn’t necessarily own the rights to all their stories, which is why you’ll find non-Disney versions in the bargain DVD bins, but they certainly own the character designs.