Intellectual property & t-shirts
My awesome obama shirt wasn’t even up for a whole 24 hours before it got flagged by the people at cafepress. I sent a nice email back asking for a specific reason for why my shirt was taken down, and I actually received a human response outlining everything.
While I don’t agree with the auto-flagging of copyrighted material, I do appreciate the human response, and I understand why they won’t sell the shirt. My problem with this is that it’s typically the copyright holder’s burden to flag infringements, and it feels icky for a company to take the task off the hands of the copyright holder. Of course, these days it’s nearly impossible for a copyright holder to find every infringement. And it’s also possible that the Obama campaign has already had some sort of agreement with cafepress regarding what is fair use and what isn’t. I’ll just cover my eyes and ears and hope that’s the case.
So maybe it’s my mistake for using such a large company. Maybe I’ll have better luck infringing copyrights with a smaller company (printfection, maybe?). Not that infringing copyrights was my end-goal, but it’s something to keep in mind nonetheless.
On the upside, I did get a shipping confirmation from cafepress today. So maybe I’ll still get the two shirts I ordered. That’s all I wanted anyway–a cool shirt to wear on super Tuesday to Manuel’s.