Teespring - the one of many choices for people wanting to sell apparel for their brands, personalities and for some to make a living, has an issue. Last night, reports started surfacing of unauthorised campaigns being run across the store without IP holder's knowledge and that their work was being sold for someone else’s profit and gain.
This was initially brought to our attention by Streamer News who retweeted ShannonZKiller after she filed a DMCA with no response for over 50 hours until she publicly called Teespring out on Twitter for it to be resolved.
UNCOOL for @teespring to leave a DMCA report 50+ hours without handling. We even DM'd them to follow up with no resolution. Still waiting...
— Shannon Plante (@ShannonZKiller) October 12, 2017
We’ve since done some investigating of our own and found a number of people’s merch, including our own, on the store against our knowledge. Some of these campaigns have been running for well over a month. From our initial investigation signs point towards the artwork being taken from competitor site Design By Humans where some users have chosen to list their designs.
We’ve since filed a DMCA request with Teespring to take down the fake campaigns with our branding which was acted upon quickly (within an hour), however it doesn’t deal with the core issue - that Teespring has a serious problem and a growing one at that. We strongly recommend that if you're selling your own merch on any platform, that you check Teespring to ensure that your merch is not being sold against your knowledge. In order to have these listings taken down, each item has a report button underneath it to file a claim. The form looks a little intimidating, but fill it out with all instances of the violation in one shot which should result in things being taken down.