How we moderate designs

Plain-language companion to the Designer Agreement. If the two ever disagree, the Agreement wins.

We print and ship every order ourselves. That means a design that infringes someone's rights is not the marketplace's problem — it is ours, and yours. This page explains what we accept, what we don't, and what happens when we're unsure.

We look at every design twice

Before it goes live. New designs are reviewed when they arrive. Most pass in minutes.

After it goes live. We keep looking. A design that passed in March can be removed in August — because a rights holder complained, because we noticed something, or because we simply looked more closely.

Being published once is not a verdict that the work is safe.

What we can't take

• Characters from films, games, comics, anime, books — including your own drawing of them. Drawing Batman yourself makes it your drawing, not your character.
• Logos, emblems and marks — company logos, sports teams, bands, and protected symbols like the Punisher skull.
• Real people — photographs, likenesses and names of living people, and of dead people whose estates enforce publicity rights.
• Someone else's photograph or illustration, including stock you don't have a print-on-demand licence for.
• "Inspired by" versions of the above. Restyling a protected character does not create a new one.
• Titles and tags that borrow someone else's name to catch their searches, even when the artwork itself is original.

What we're glad to take

Your own patterns, lettering, illustrations, photographs, characters and jokes. Genres, styles, moods and subjects are free: anyone may draw a dragon, a skull, a panda or a ramen bowl. What is not free is a *specific* dragon that someone else invented.

Public domain

Work whose copyright has expired is fine — Hokusai's wave, Arthurian knights, classical ornament. Note two traps: a modern *rendering* of a public-domain subject may itself be protected, and a public-domain image may still carry a trademark if a company uses it as a mark.

Three outcomes when something is wrong

1. We decline it. The design is not published. You get a message saying why.

2. We narrow it. The design stays on your designer page but leaves the storefront, search and advertising. We use this when the artwork is fine but something around it isn't — a borrowed title, an unclear rights question, a subject we'd rather not advertise.

3. We remove it. For clear infringement, or when a rights holder complains.

In all three cases you get a message in your designer chat explaining what happened. Disagree? Reply. If you can show us the rights, or show us we misread the image, we put it back.

When we're not sure

We act anyway, usually by narrowing rather than removing. The cost is asymmetric: declining a good design annoys a designer, and we can fix that in a day. Selling an infringing one can cost us the ability to advertise, take payments, or trade at all.

We would rather apologise to you than to Disney's lawyers. We'd also rather explain that honestly than pretend our judgement is perfect.

AI tools

Use them. They don't change the rules. A prompt that names a protected character produces a protected character, and the fact that a model drew it does not make it yours. Note also that our own mockup generator sometimes refuses to render a design on content grounds — when that happens, it is usually telling us something.

Repeated problems

One mistake is a conversation. A pattern ends the partnership. We would much rather have the conversation.

Questions: partners@allover.art