How to Avoid Copyright Infringement With T-Shirts

To avoid copyright infringement with t-shirts, print only three kinds of designs: artwork you created yourself from scratch, work that is in the public domain, or work you have a written license to use on merchandise for sale. Every other shortcut, from modifying someone else’s logo to drawing a celebrity by hand to using a “free” font, can trigger a takedown, a lawsuit, or statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work.¹

The Three Rights You Can Infringe

Three separate legal regimes cover what goes on a shirt, and a single design can violate all three at once.

Copyright covers original creative works the moment they’re fixed in tangible form: drawings, photographs, graphic designs, illustrations, written text. No registration required. Whoever made the artwork automatically holds the exclusive right to reproduce it, distribute it, display it, and make new works based on it.² Print their image on fabric and sell it, and you have used all four of those rights without permission.

Trademark covers words, names, symbols, and logos that identify the source of goods. The Nike swoosh and “Just Do It” are trademarks because they tell buyers where the shirt came from. Using someone else’s trademarked logo or slogan on a shirt creates the impression that your product is connected to their brand, and that’s exactly what trademark law is designed to stop.³ For apparel, trademarks are registered under international Class 25, which covers clothing, footwear, and headwear.

Right of publicity covers a person’s name, face, voice, and other recognizable personal traits. It exists in most states and applies whether the person is a celebrity or not, and whether they’re living or, in many states, dead. It applies regardless of who took the photograph or drew the portrait.

A cartoon character usually triggers all three: the drawing is copyrighted, the character’s name and look are trademarked, and if the character is based on a real performer’s likeness, publicity rights come in too.

Common Mistakes That Count as Infringement

Most t-shirt infringement is not deliberate piracy. It’s sellers relying on rules of thumb that aren’t actually the law.

“I changed it enough.” Swapping colors on a logo, flipping an image, or adding a new element to a copyrighted illustration produces what the law calls a derivative work. The right to make derivative works belongs to the original copyright holder.² You need the same permission for a modified version as you would for a straight copy.

“It’s my own drawing of the celebrity.” Your original portrait is your copyrighted work, but the person depicted still has a publicity right over the commercial use of their likeness. Recognizable catchphrases, signatures, and distinctive visual elements tied to a specific person are covered too. The federal Lanham Act also gives a cause of action when someone’s identity is used in a way that falsely implies endorsement.³

“The logo isn’t identical.” Trademark infringement doesn’t require an exact copy. Courts ask whether your use creates a likelihood of confusion about who made or endorsed the product, looking at how similar the marks are, how close the goods are, evidence of actual confusion, and whether you chose the mark intentionally. If a reasonable buyer might think your shirt is official or endorsed, that’s enough.

“The phrase is generic.” Short, ordinary-sounding phrases are often registered trademarks for apparel. Before printing any word or phrase, search the USPTO’s trademark database at tmsearch.uspto.gov, particularly under Class 25. A five-minute check can save a print run.

Safe Sources for T-Shirt Designs

Create It Yourself

Original artwork you draw from your own imagination is the cleanest route. You own the copyright, you control every right, no license is needed, and you have the strongest position if a competitor later copies you.

Use Public Domain Work

When a copyright expires, the work enters the public domain and anyone can use it commercially. As of January 1, 2026, all works published in the United States in 1930 or earlier are in the public domain, including books, art, sheet music, and photographs from that era.⁴ The Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons both host searchable collections.

One warning. A public domain image can still involve a live trademark. The original 1928 version of Mickey Mouse entered the public domain in 2024, but Disney still holds trademarks on Mickey’s name and modern likeness. You can use that specific early design; you cannot use it in a way that suggests Disney is behind the shirt.

License the Artwork for Merchandise

“Free to download” does not mean “free to print on shirts for sale.” Read the actual license. Creative Commons is a common framework, but each variant is different: CC BY allows commercial use with attribution, while CC BY-NC prohibits commercial use, which rules out selling shirts bearing the image.⁵

On paid stock image sites, check whether the standard license covers “merchandise” or “products for resale.” Many commercial licenses cover websites and marketing but exclude physical goods. You typically need an extended or merchandise-specific license, which costs more and explicitly permits printing on items for sale.

Check the Font License

This one catches sellers by surprise. The visual shapes of letters are not protected by copyright, but the font software files that produce those letters on your computer are protected as computer programs.⁶ Using a font file without the right license to create commercial merchandise can trigger an infringement claim on the software side.

Before dropping a font into a design, open its license file. Many free fonts are personal-use only. Commercial use often requires a separate purchase, and some licenses treat “products for sale” or “merchandise” as its own category with a higher fee.

Where Fair Use and Parody Actually Apply

Fair use is the defense sellers most often hope will save them, and in the t-shirt context it almost never does. The doctrine allows unlicensed use in limited circumstances, weighed under four statutory factors.⁷

The first factor looks at whether the use is commercial and whether it’s “transformative,” meaning it adds something new with a different purpose. Selling shirts is inherently commercial, and moving an image from one medium onto fabric is not transformative.⁸ The fourth factor asks whether your shirt competes with the copyright owner’s own merchandise or licensing program. Because most popular works already have licensed apparel, an unlicensed shirt is exactly the sale the rights holder would otherwise capture.

Parody is the narrow exception people invoke, and the Supreme Court has drawn a sharp line: parody uses the original to comment on that specific work, while satire borrows the work as a vehicle for unrelated commentary and gets much weaker fair use treatment.⁹ A shirt that mocks a specific cartoon character using its own image may qualify. A shirt that uses the character to make a political joke unrelated to the character will not. Even genuine parody still runs through all four factors, and commercial parody faces closer scrutiny than non-commercial.

Using AI-Generated Designs

AI image generators are popular for shirt design, and the legal picture is still forming. Two issues matter for a seller.

First, ownership. The U.S. Copyright Office has said copyright protects only material produced by human creativity. An image generated from a text prompt alone is not human-authored and cannot be registered. You can put it on a shirt and sell it, but you may not be able to stop competitors from copying it. Human contributions can shift this. Selecting and arranging AI elements creatively, or significantly modifying the output by hand, can qualify those human-authored portions for protection; the Copyright Office requires applicants to disclose and disclaim the more-than-minimal AI portions in any registration.¹⁰

Second, infringement risk on the output side. Ongoing lawsuits challenge whether models trained on copyrighted images can produce infringing outputs. If your AI generates something that closely resembles an existing copyrighted work, you can face a claim regardless of how the image was made. Read the AI platform’s terms of service too. Some grant commercial rights to outputs; others restrict commercial use on beta features or add conditions.

What Happens If You Get It Wrong

A copyright owner who sues can take either their actual damages plus your profits, or statutory damages of $750 to $30,000 per infringed work. Willful infringement raises that ceiling to $150,000 per work.¹ Five infringing designs can mean up to $750,000 before legal fees.

Courts can also issue injunctions that halt sales and order seizure or destruction of the inventory.

For most sellers, the faster consequence lives on the platform side. Marketplaces respond to IP complaints by removing listings to protect their own safe harbor, and repeat strikes lead to account suspension or permanent bans. Losing a seller account can end the business overnight.

Responding to a DMCA Takedown

If you sell online, the enforcement tool you’re most likely to encounter is a DMCA takedown. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a copyright holder notifies the platform that a listing infringes their work, and the platform pulls the listing.¹¹

If you believe the notice was wrong, you can file a counter-notification. A valid counter-notice includes your signature, identification of the removed material and where it appeared, a statement under penalty of perjury that the removal was a mistake, your contact information, and consent to federal court jurisdiction.¹¹ The platform must then restore the listing within 10 to 14 business days unless the original complainant sues you in that window.

“Under penalty of perjury” is not boilerplate. A false counter-notice creates real legal exposure, so file one only if you genuinely believe the takedown was wrong. Rights holders who send knowingly false notices can be liable too.

The bigger business risk is accumulation. Most platforms run a repeat infringer policy, and multiple strikes shorten the runway to account termination. Running a whole shirt operation on one marketplace account without verifying the IP status of every design gets riskier with every listing you add.

1
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 USC 504 – Remedies for Infringement: Damages and Profits
2
United States Code. 17 USC 106 – Exclusive Rights in Copyrighted Works
3
Legal Information Institute (LII) / Cornell Law School. Trademark
4
Library of Congress Blogs. Lifecycle of Copyright: 1930 Works in the Public Domain
5
Creative Commons. About CC Licenses
6
U.S. Copyright Office. Copyrightable Authorship: What Can Be Registered
7
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 USC 107 – Limitations on Exclusive Rights: Fair Use
8
U.S. Copyright Office. U.S. Copyright Office Fair Use Index
9
Justia Law. Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994)
10
Federal Register. Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence
11
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 U.S. Code 512 – Limitations on Liability Relating to Material Online