How to Protect T-Shirt Designs

If you have an outstanding original idea for a line of T-shirts or other apparel that you hope to market for profit, you need to protect your design from theft by others. This is true for any original creative design idea, but especially for T-shirts. T-shirt designs are so easy to steal, reproduce and distribute these days that copyrighting and trademarking your design is mandatory to protect your rights.

Instructions

1. Make sure your design is completely your own. If your T-shirt design is based in whole or in part on any other commercial image or product that may be trademarked or copyrighted, you will not be able to protect it with a copyright or trademark of your own. A court case was brought by an artist against the distributor of a very popular T-shirt featuring President Obama in 2009; the court found the T-shirt maker guilty of theft of intellectual property because he had based his design on a photo from the Associated Press.

2. Contact the US Office of Copyrights (USOC) and file the required paperwork to legally stake your claim to ownership of a particular T-shirt graphic design. Filing a proper copyright costs approximately $35 per item when filed electronically but is well worth the legal protection. Holding copyright to an artistic image will stand up in court in most cases. A "poor man's copyright"---gained by mailing a copy of the image to yourself and keeping the postmarked envelope sealed---does not carry the same weight in court but it is free. Copyrighting can take less than 90 days to complete through the USOC.

3. Contact the US Office of Patents and Trademarks (USOPT) and file for ownership to the images and slogans on your line of T-shirts. The filing fee for a USOPT trademark is $325 per item. Get the help of a lawyer or a paralegal since there are several important procedures involved in trademarking a commercial product. You must be certain someone else has not already trademarked either your image or your slogan. Your filing fee is not refundable; if you make a mistake, your trademark application will be rejected and you will lose your filing fee. Trademarking takes approximately six months to complete but is definite proof of ownership of images combined with slogans.

4. Print your copyright and/or trademark symbols on your T-shirts and watermark your marketing literature to let others know your design is protected.

Tips & Warnings

• You cannot use any images of any trademarked products in your T-shirt design, including popular cartoon and especially Disney characters. You cannot use images of some famous people such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley or Michael Jackson, since their estates have trademarked their names as well as their images. Neither can you use pictures of products, like Heinz Ketchup bottles, nor product slogans like "Good To The Last Drop," as these would also constitute trademark infringement.

References

• US Office of Copyrights
• US Office of Patents and Trademarks
• Marquette University Law School; "The Obama Hope Poster Case;" February 2009

Resources

• Read this Article in Spanish
• T-Shirt Forums Online Community