Another Copyright Removal and Should I Even Bother?

[jennifer22]

So, now my baseball card vintage collection has been removed due to a copyright claim. This is very discouraging. I hand-edited 40 cards from 1909-1911 to fix tears, etc., and then laid them out as a pattern. One of the resulting products was even chosen as an editor's pick (below). Now I get an email that they're being removed due to copyright. These cards are over 100 years old. It makes me want to not even bother with vintage and public domain imagery, which is unfortunate because this imagery can be beautiful and great to work with.

[Barbara]

When you replied to the take-down mail, did they answer with any kind of detail?

Colorwash's Home

[jennifer22]

I haven't received a response yet. Will update when I do.

[KeegansCreation]

Did you tag it with any team names? It's possible that if the teams are still in existence, that's the problem.

[jennifer22]

I tagged a few names of these individuals, but I don't think I tagged team names. That's a good thought, though. The cards themselves have team names. I wonder if this could be a problem?

[PacifierCity]

In some of the images, team names that still exist are displayed... Cubs and A's... 

It will be interesting to see what team Zazzle responds with as to why it is infringing...  but the team names may be the reason why too...

PC

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[PenguinPower]

My first thought was the team names/logos. The ones that just have a city name, I'd expect are OK, but the Cubs and the A's are still around and the A's still use that same logo.. 

[jennifer22]

You all are so helpful! I think you may be right. I wish I still had access to all these products so I could do something to cut out each team name but save the rest...

[jennifer22]

This is unrelated, but this just happened a few minutes ago. Brightened my mood. (Name/location blocked for customer privacy.) 

[KeegansCreation]

Congrats on the very big sale. Perhaps these will be resold, or given to everybody in some company/organization/school or be the decorations of an extremely large tree or be given to every person the purchaser knows. 😁

[jennifer22]

I've been thinking of various possibilities, like your school/organization idea. Or maybe they even worked on the new Webb telescope (as these are both images from JWST) and want to send ornaments of a couple of its photos to everyone. Haha, definitely gets me wondering! Thanks for the congrats! I think this is my highest daily total since starting here in 2019.

[JLynnW]

Congratulations! That should definitely brighten your mood. It even brightened mine.

[Sandra-]

That’s brilliant! Congratulations 🎉

[SkullPilot]

That's AWESOME!! I haven't had any giant orders for ages. I did get a few orders back in 2018 and 2019, all from the same customer buying 144 at a time, but it was postcards, so none of them managed to get over the $10 mark. I definitely need to put some designs onto higher-priced products, and see how they do! Ha ha. Congrats on your success!

[Barbara]

Holy toadstools!!!

Colorwash's Home

[PenguinPower]

They are overzealous.... I just got dinged for an image I know is public domain. I'm fighting it, but I don't know that I'll be successful... I don't use much vintage imagery, but on a whim (and having a lot of downtime at the beginning of the pandemic) I decided to see if I could redraw a detailed engraving as a vector image so that it could be used in large format and settled on the Inverted Jenny stamp, as something I know is in the public domain. It turned out *awesome*...  but the Z censors haven't figured out (and appear unwilling to listen) that stamps created before 1971 are public domain (as works of the government).

[Connie]

Could it be because this particular stamp was recreated a few years ago by the USPS, and so Zazzle thinks it's a copy of the new one, instead of the old one?

[kennethwfd]

I had a photo of the Flying Scotsman taken down because the driver, Ben Potter was identified, so I wonder whether there is an issue with any of the players depicted. I too obtained some images supposedly in the public domain, there is a folder containing autographed photos of movie stars, I am sure Zazzle will have an issue with them, especially as I understand images of Marilyn Monroe, for example,  are not in the public domain.

Congrats on the sale, it is an encouragement to see an unsolicited example of sales on Zazzle, most emails I get on making money on Zazzle, or indeed making money are usually trying to sell me something. The latest is "I can get your website onto page 1 of Google"

[jennifer22]

Sigh... and another one was removed today. I'm guessing this historical Civil War chart was removed because of the tiny Confederate flag next to the US flag.  It took me days to clean this antique document up, bit by bit. I get the no-Confederate flag thing, but I thought that would be for full-size, modern use, not its occurrence in this type of vintage war illustration.

[Connie]

Wow, that IS going overboard! It's so tiny you can't even hardly see it, and for sure is used in the historical context!

[PenguinPower]

Maybe…. But the reissue is for $2 not 24¢..  The USPS has just as much right to the image as any of us, but their reprint doesn’t give them exclusive rights to the original. 

[PenguinPower]

Sigh... I sent them all of the information that shows that the Inverted Jenny is in the public domain and they sent me back a link to the content guides and user agreement (which doesn't mention stamps or postage anywhere), and a statement that "postage designs"  are not permitted... It feels very arbitrary.. 

[jennifer22]

Update on both -- yes, it's because of the small Confederate flag. Got confirmation from Zazzle. And for the first one, Zazzle says this had to be removed because Zazzle is not authorized to sell team merchandise.