A common question is whether or not you can embroider or digitize sport team logos or well-known book, television, or movie characters.
In most cases, these logos and designs were not legally sold or digitized.
Where to find information about United States’ copyrights:
Three places to learn about USA copyrights:
and the USA Copyright Office’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/USCopyrightOffice
You can also find quality information at intellectual property attorney websites, as they frequently have articles that explain specific situations.
The size and scope of the problem:
Copyright infringement is a problem that won’t go away. People wonder why major websites can’t simply keep people from selling and uploading infringing material.
Copyright infringement is similar any other stolen property. Theft happens. When the stolen property is discovered, then the guilty parties wind up paying. There is the actual theft of the stolen property and then there is the receipt of stolen property.
You can’t use illegally obtained items even for personal use.
It is like saying you can break into someone’s house, but as long as you just wanted to use the house for personal use then it is okay to sleep there and stay there (and it isn’t). Once the first illegal act occurs. then every other thing that follows is also illegal.
Because the products are uploaded by many individuals who pay for use of the website, then Etsy doesn’t police the website. (Example: A landlord doesn’t police and search a rental property–the renter is responsible for the house’s contents. Etsy owns the ‘house’ and the Etsy sellers are responsible for their shop’s content.) Current laws say that the individual users are responsible for their own uploaded content to a website. And individual companies are responsible for notifying Etsy when they find their copyright/trademark infringing designs.
The problem is so large that companies can’t find everyone all at once. So new sellers always pop up as soon as one seller’s illegal designs are removed. There is a legal process that has to be followed to have designs removed. That process is time consuming when you deal with a problem this large, and companies pay employees to search the internet and find the illegal designs. But the internet is a huge place. So that is why you find illegal designs on Etsy.
Each buyer has to decide their own standards. Just realize there is some risk involved. Some companies make people pay (a demand letter, where they name a fee to cover their legal costs), while others just send cease and desist notices. What you don’t want to do is have anything wind up in court, as there isn’t any defense for copyright infringement. Look up a recent Eric Clapton case, as he sues when he finds illegal copies of his works.
Where to purchase licensed designs:
The ibroidery website is the only legal website that I know about for Disney, Marvel, and other designs like this. You can find some old CDs out there, where companies used to sell legally licensed designs (like Peanuts) — but you need to be careful with those also.
While universities do have “Craft Licenses,” when I looked into purchasing one of their licenses, they do NOT license embroidery designs. They license physical products that have been pre-approved by the university and which do not duplicate anything they sell. So they would not approve hats, shirts, blankets, towels, and things like that.
With the craft license, you are provided a limited number of holographic tags for a specific fee, and the tags indicate that the physical product produced was legal. If you go outside that craft license (you produce something not approved or produce too many items), then you would be legally liable for infringement. Each university has a webpage where they have a list of all legal vendors using a craft license. So you can check to see if a specific vendor is on that list and legally selling that item.
Brother set up ibroidery, as they pay Disney big bucks for a license to sell Disney and Marvel designs. You must have a Brother machine to stitch out these designs, as each design is registered to ONE machine. You can move your design’s registration when you upgrade (to another Brother machine), but you are limited in the number of times you can move the design to a new Brother machine. The ibroidery designs are in a special format that only Brother machines recognize.
There are slightly different rules for physical products and for digital products.
With digital items (even if the digital item is sold on a CD or USB), you are NOT actually purchasing the design. You are purchasing the license to use the design for personal use. The license is an important distinction (as the First Sale Doctrine does not apply when you purchase a license). You are entering into a contract (the license) where only the original user has a license to use the design.