Caution! Legal Action Blues…

So a friend of mine & I recently decided we were going to open a CafePress shop together to finally make shirts, etc. with all the silly things we keep on thinking up that make us titter with glee. Last week we signed up, and on Friday we started uploading some content, and by Saturday, we had some of our content pulled because of possible trademark infringement.

This is going to sound really lame, but that’s only because it *is* really lame. Apparently, there’s some company out there that thinks they have the exclusive right to the word “caution” when it comes to apparel design. So, in order to protect shop owners from legal action, CafePress regularly pulls all content featuring the word “caution”. Seriously, if you put the word into their internal search engine, you get zero search results.

It’s no major hassle. All we have to do is change the design to “Warning: May Contain Nuts”, and it’s almost as good as the original. But really, it’s the principle of the whole thing that irks me to no end. Small people with lawyers do our species a disservice.