DMCA

Last updated: November 11, 2026

Tee Crate draws its own birthday designs: number candles, scoops of ice cream, a fire truck for a fourth birthday, a high-five hand, a paper banner for double digits. We expect the same respect for creative work from everyone who uses teecrate.shop. This page explains how to tell us if you believe something on our site copies your copyrighted work, what we do when we get your notice, and how a person whose material was removed can respond. Trademark, character and other non-copyright concerns are handled on our Intellectual Property Policy page.

1. What this page covers

This page applies to everything published on teecrate.shop: product designs and the drawings on our product pages, product pictures, the drawn bands on our homepage and category pages, product descriptions, policy and help pages, and our logo. It follows the notice-and-takedown process of the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512) and works in a similar way for rights holders in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

It also covers shirts we have printed. Our personalised designs carry text typed by customers, such as a child’s name, an age, a role like “Big Sister” or a party date. Customers may not ask us to print anything that belongs to someone else, and we refuse text that obviously does. If you think a shirt sold through our site carries your protected work, this process is the right way to tell us.

2. Before you send a notice

A few common situations are not copyright problems, and knowing them can save you time:

• Ideas and themes. Copyright protects a specific drawing or text, not a general idea. Many stores sell shirts with a big number for an age or an ice-cream theme for a birthday. Our drawings are our own, and two different drawings of the same idea are usually not copies of each other.
• Short phrases. Common birthday phrases are generally not protected by copyright on their own. If you hold a trademark in a phrase, use our Intellectual Property Policy process instead.
• Names. A first name typed for a personalised shirt is not a copyrighted work.

If you are not sure whether your case is copyright or trademark, send it anyway with a short explanation. We will route it to the right process and will not ask you to start again.

3. How to send a copyright notice

Your notice must be in writing and include:

1. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or of a person authorised to act for them. A typed full name at the end of an email works as an electronic signature.
2. A description of the copyrighted work you believe was infringed, such as the title of an illustration, a link to where you published it, or a registration number if you have one.
3. The exact page address on teecrate.shop of each item you believe infringes, for example the link to a product page, and which picture or text on that page you mean.
4. Your name, postal address, telephone number and email address, so we can reach you.
5. A statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent or the law.
6. A statement that the information in your notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the copyright owner or are authorised to act on the owner’s behalf.

Email the notice to support@teecrate.shop with “Copyright notice” in the subject line. You may also post it to Tee Crate, 11 Brookside Dr, Delmar, NY 12054, US, but email is faster because that is how our support works. Notices missing one of the six items can still be read, but we will have to ask you for the missing part before we act, and that takes longer.

4. What we do when we receive a notice

Where the material is one of our own designs, we take the product page down while we review a valid notice and do not print new orders of that design. If customers had already ordered a shirt with that design, we tell you what we can do about orders in progress, and we offer those customers a full refund if we cancel their order.

Where the notice is about text a customer typed for a personalised shirt, we cancel that order if it has not been printed yet, refund the customer, and tell them why. We keep a short record of the notice and of what we did.

5. Counter-notification

If material you provided was removed and you believe that happened by mistake or because it was misidentified, you may send us a counter-notification. In practice this applies mostly to customers whose personalised order was cancelled after a notice. It must include:

1. Your physical or electronic signature.
2. Identification of the material that was removed and where it appeared before removal, such as your order number and the text you typed.
3. A statement under penalty of perjury that you believe in good faith the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification.
4. Your name, address and telephone number, and a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the federal court for the district where your address is located (or, if you are outside the United States, any judicial district in which Tee Crate may be found), and that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the original notice.

We forward a complete counter-notification to the person who sent the original notice. If they do not tell us within 10 to 14 business days that they have filed a court action, we may restore the material or accept a new order with the same text.

6. False or misleading notices

Under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f), anyone who knowingly makes a material misrepresentation in a notice or a counter-notification may be liable for damages, including costs and legal fees. Please send a notice only for work you own or represent, and think about fair use before you send one. If you are unsure, getting legal advice first is wise.

7. Repeat infringement

We do not accept new personalised orders from customers who repeatedly ask us to print material that belongs to others, and we may close their accounts. We also remove any design of ours that is the subject of a valid notice from every page where it appears, including category pages and the HTML Sitemap.

8. How we keep our own designs original

Every design in the store is drawn for Tee Crate. We do not use cartoon characters, licensed characters, brand logos, sports team names or school names, and we do not copy drawings from other stores or marketplaces. Product pictures are made for our own listings. When we write a product description, we write it ourselves. Our Terms of Service ask customers to follow the same rules for anything they type into a personalisation field.

9. A well-written notice, step by step

Most delays come from notices that do not say which picture or text is meant. Here is what a notice that can be handled in one pass usually looks like, written in plain words:

1. A first line saying who you are and that you own, or act for the owner of, an illustration or text.
2. A link to where your work is published, or an attached copy, and the date you created or published it if you know it.
3. The link to our product page and a sentence such as “the main picture on this page shows a drawing copied from my illustration”, or “the second paragraph of the description repeats my text”.
4. Your full contact details.
5. The two statements in items 5 and 6 of section 3, in your own words.
6. Your full name typed at the end as your signature.

Screenshots help us find the right place on a page, especially on a product with several colours, where each colour may have its own picture. Please tell us which colour or size you looked at.

10. What we cannot do

We can only remove material from teecrate.shop and stop printing a design ourselves. We cannot take down copies on other websites, marketplaces or social media, and we cannot settle disputes between other parties. If you found your work on another site that also links to us, please send your notice to that site as well.

We also cannot give legal advice. We will tell you what we did with your notice and why, but we cannot tell you whether you have a claim against anyone else.

11. If someone copies our designs

Seen a Tee Crate drawing, such as our number candle or the crate-and-candle logo, on a shirt sold somewhere else? We would like to know. Email support@teecrate.shop with a link and, if you can, a screenshot. We read every message, though we may not be able to tell you what we do next if it becomes a legal matter.

12. How we handle the information in a notice

A notice contains personal details, so we treat it with the same care as an order. We use your details only to handle the notice. When we forward a notice to a customer whose order was affected, we may remove your phone number and postal address where the law allows, but we usually share your name so the customer knows who raised the concern. Counter-notifications are forwarded in full to the person who sent the original notice, as the law requires. More on how we look after personal information is in our Privacy Policy.

If you are not the rights owner but want to point out a possible problem, such as a design you think looks like one you saw elsewhere, you can still email us. We cannot treat it as a formal notice, but we will look at the design ourselves and act if we find a real problem.

13. Contact

For copyright matters, email support@teecrate.shop with “Copyright notice” in the subject. For trademarks, characters and other rights, see the Intellectual Property Policy. For anything else, visit Contact Us or the Help Center.