 Print on demand stores, they're being shut down and sued. Here's why Redbubble, Etsy, and Teespring are closing stores. Hey, are you worried? You should be, because these major stores are shutting down people right and left. In this video, I'm gonna share with you why they're doing it and how you can keep your store open and we're starting right now. Look, having a print on demand store can be great, but what if you build up that store and you're making money and things are going well and all of a sudden you get shut down? You don't get any notice whatsoever and they just shut your store down. Why are they doing it? What's going on here? This is craziness. It's happening everywhere. In this video, I'm gonna explain to you why. Let's get started right now. Now, I get messages all the time from people who are saying, hey, JR, they shut down my Facebook ads account. They shut down this account. They shut down that's account. But the one thing I'm hearing more and more is these stores, these Redbubbles, these Etsies, all these Teesprings, these tea launch stores are getting shut down and I figured out why. Let's take a look at one comment here. This here's from Money Guy. Two hours ago, my Redbubble store has been active for three weeks and I haven't gotten a single sale. Can you look at it and let me know what I'm doing wrong? Hey, I'll do that. If you guys wanna post something like that, here's the link and I x'd it out so you guys couldn't see it. But here's the funny thing. When I clicked on it, look what I got. I got this simple message right here from Redbubble. You found a glitch? We've been notified of a 500 server error. Now they shut down the store and I probably know why I can't look and see but I've seen enough stores to know why this one probably got shut down and I wanna share this with you so it doesn't happen to you. Now, here's the truth. A lot of people will start a store, an online store, drop shipping store where they're doing t-shirts and hats and jackets and all that and they really don't have the business sense they need yet. They don't know what the rules are and I mean these rules, when you go to these sites and set up your stores they're just long and they go on forever and they don't read them. And that's the problem right there guys. They don't read them and they don't have to tell you why they shut your store down. They can just shut it down. So the only way to protect yourself from any of this is to make sure you understand the rules and you play by them fairly. Now this is the exact reason I did this video is to help you guys out so you don't have these problems. I'm gonna give you a legal disclaimer. I am not a lawyer, okay? I did not go to law school. I do not know the law inside and out. And if you want legal advice on what to do on your site, don't ask me. I'm just a YouTube guy, okay? But with that having been said I'm gonna show you some examples and talk to you about why these people are having a problem. Now here you go. Let's play a little game. You got five seconds to tell me why this picture here is illegal, all right? And we'll count to five, four, three, two, one. Do you know why? If you know why, type it in the comments. Type in the comments why you think this picture here is illegal. Why this picture, if you put it on a T-shirt or something is gonna get you shut down. Why is that? Why? Because it's a copyright infringement, okay? Copyright is a federal law. Let me put it up here on the screen so you can see it. Copyright is a federal law of the United States that protects original works of authorship. A work of authorship includes literary, written, dramatic, artistic, musical and certain types of other works, okay? Next part, listen to this guys. Copyright attaches as soon as the original work is created. You don't have to file anything, okay? As soon as it's created it applies to both published and unpublished works. As soon as you type words, click the shutter on your camera or for many of you hit the home button on your iPhone apply paint to a canvas or paper or lay down tracks for your next hit you've got copyright with some exception. So it's not something you actually have to file with the copyright office. Though it's not a bad idea to, you could have that copyright. You could have taken let's say a picture, okay? And put it online. And it's been there for five years and somebody uses it. You can sue them for copyright infringement. You can actually file your copyright at that time right before you sue them. You could do that. Now, listen to this next part. Copyright is an automatic right and does not require the author to file special paperwork. As in the case for trademark and patent, registration is required to enforce the rights but as a matter of right an author is not required to register anything to get the right to use the circle C showing the work is copyright. So keep that in mind. If you come up with something, if you come up with a design, if you write something or whatever you want to copyright it you can just put the C there. That's all you gotta do. I'm gonna tell you because a lot of people do this. They steal pictures. They steal them. Now, they don't mean to, I understand they, I get it. They don't mean to, they go to Google, they search images, they find an image that works for what they want and they use it. Now, I'm not recommending you do that because you will get in trouble. Now, the question is a lot of you guys will say, well, I see people all the time using Google images and they never get in trouble. They never have a problem. So it shouldn't be a problem for me. But that's not how it works. It's kind of luck of the draw. You may get an image today and it's the first image you ever had. You put it on your website and somebody sees it and they sue you. They sue you big time. They can sue you for 10,000, 20,000, 50,000. Here's the funny thing about the United States. It's arbitrary. There's no set amount. So they can come to you and say, well, I want to see you for $50,000 for this picture and they can see you for that. I can see you for 100,000. I've seen people get letters like this and there's a lot of lawyers out there too that will just send out letters with these fake lawsuits or whatever. They're really just people trying to collect money from people. But the fact is it can really happen. So you do have to worry about it. So how can you protect yourself? Well, the first thing you can do is you can, when you search in Google, is you can look for creative comments, okay? Pictures that actually have the rights to actually reuse them. Now, this is not a guarantee. This is not a guarantee, I'm telling you. But it is one way that you can protect yourself by searching these images that have this little drop down here that will allow you to use the pictures without any accreditation to anybody else. Now, you may be saying to yourself, well, can I just search copyrights for pictures? No, you can, because like I just told you, if you have a picture, if you have a design, you're not required to copyright the picture to have the copyright advantage, to have the copyright protection. So you can copyright it at any point you want, but the copyright goes into effect as soon as you publish it in the public domain. What's another way you can protect yourself? Well, you can create your own stuff, okay? You can create your own ideas, your own slogans, your own pictures, your own videos, and then you don't have to worry about it because you created it. The other thing you can do is you can pay a site that has copyrighted pictures but allows you to use them. So maybe you want music and you go to Epidemic Sound or maybe you want pictures so you go to, you know, Shutterstock Photos or one of these sites like that and you pay a fee for the pictures, okay? That's one way to go about it. But there's other things that you wanna be aware of. Now, I'm gonna show you another picture right here and this is a picture of Vincent Van Gogh. I'll give you five seconds. Can you use this picture of Vincent Van Gogh? Five, four, three, two, one. Now, put in the comments. Is it a yes or no? Can you use this picture of Vincent Van Gogh? Obviously, this is a famous painting, okay? So obviously, somebody had some rights to it but can you use it? That's the question. So put in the comments, yes or no? Can you use this? Can you use Vincent here on your website? The answer is yes, you can. Yes, it's an original work but if the copyright has expired of which this one has, it's been many, many, many years and I'm gonna show you a chart for that in a second or it's entered the public domain then you're allowed to use it even though somebody didn't have a copyright. So I'll put it up on the screen here, the definition. A public domain image is defined as a photo, clipart or vector whose copyright has expired or never existed in the first place. These images can be used for almost anyone for personal and commercial uses. There are three ways that the public domain image occur. Okay, now check this out guys. The image is assigned to the public domain through a Creative Commons zero license or similar release. The image is not copyrightable or the copyright for the image has expired. Now you will find that museums, libraries, photographers sick of traditional stock photos have released thousands of public domain images online and you can actually use them. Okay, that makes them easily accessible for the public and yep, that means designers too. So if you wanna use those in your design, you can do that. Now I wanna offer you guys and you're gonna find it in the download section, a list of all the public domain images that you can actually use. You'll find those at the list. You'll find that in the description below. So click on that and you can go ahead and get those and use those for your websites or whatever. So keep in mind, these sites like Redbubble, sites like Etsy, any of these sites where you're doing your print on demand stuff, they want you on there. They want you to sell your products. They want your designs because that's the only way they make money is if they have products to sell and since they don't charge you fees, the only way to make money is if you sell products. So if you're thinking, well, these people just want me out of business. They don't like me, they don't want me here. That's why they shut me down. It's just not true. It's because you did something wrong and generally it's because of copyright infringement because they are ultimately responsible for their website. So if they allow you to put these pictures on their website that are obviously copyright pictures, then they could get shut down and they don't want that to happen. So they have this responsibility to actually police, monitor and rid that site of anything that is copyrighted material. But I hear it all the time. I hear it, you know, I hear it on YouTube all the time. People say, well, YouTube doesn't like me. They're not sending me any traffic. You know, they're not recommending my videos. I never get recommended videos. It's not that. It's because you're not doing what they want. Maybe your video's not long enough. Maybe it's one that they can't monetize because you use foul language in it. Maybe your channel gets low watch time. Maybe you're sending people off of YouTube. They watch 10 seconds of your video and you're sending them to your website and they see that you're sending all these people away and your channel is just a black hole and they know if they send traffic to it that people are gone. So there's reasons and you've gotta understand whoever that third party is, what their reason is for being there. These sites like Etsy and Redbubble and all that, the reason for being there is they wanna sell product and make money off it, okay? That's what they wanna do. YouTube wants to have people come on to YouTube. They want them to watch videos and continue watching and stay on the platform and then they wanna be able to run ads to them, okay? So if you're not allowing them to but you're sending them off the website or your videos aren't engaging enough and they don't watch enough or if your videos aren't long enough they can't run ads or if you're not monetizing they can't run ads. You've got no reason to suggest your videos. They just don't, okay? So keep that in mind. You're gonna be safe and you're gonna be fine as long as you follow the rules. I would recommend on any of these sites that you actually sit down and read the rules before you put your products up there and cause you a lot of headaches if you don't do that. So I highly recommend it. Now if you haven't done so, you need to get my course. There's a $97 course down there. I'm giving away absolutely free. All you need to do is click the link. No credit card required and you can grab it. If you haven't subscribed to this channel, I need you to. I mean, I really, really, I just need you. You right there. You right there in the blue shirt. Uh-huh. The blonde hair grower right there. I need you. Yeah, you, the bald-headed guy, I need you. I need you. I need you to subscribe. Please do so. That was some pitiful begging but I really do want you to subscribe. And once you've done that, don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications. When you do that, you will know when I do a new video. You won't have to come searching. You'll have to waste your time. You're not gonna miss anything because I'm gonna notify you as soon as that video goes up. So make sure you do that. What else? How about a thumbs up for the YouTube algorithm? We like that one, don't we? Thank you so much for watching this video, guys. I really appreciate it. Put your comments below. If you have questions about this, if you've had problems with copyrights, if you've had problems with losing your accounts, put that below. If you like this video, say I like it. Just put that in the comments below. I really appreciate you being here and I'll see you, guess what, in the next video. Hey, thanks for watching my video. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click that little bell right there so you can be notified every time I do a new video. Also, click on one of those videos there. Keep watching on my channel.