Anybody involved in the creative process has got to see the importance of copyrights and its cousins...trademarks and patents. Copyrights protect the interests of the authors and creators by granting them a temporary monopoly, or ownership of exclusive rights for a specified length of time. That's cool.
What fries my bacon are the Copyright Fascists, usually immortal corporations, that hold tightly their ages-old copyrights with iron fists. Remember when the Disney people were suing a children's day-care center for painting Snow White designs on the walls. People like that are just dick-heads.
Here's a t-shirt design I worked up for the Band Geek Section on my Retro Ranger Cafepress store.
This design lasted about 45 minutes on Cafepress before it got the boot. Unfortunately, Cafepress doesn't explain why a design gets tossed. Let's see, could be Warner Brothers, they probably hold the copyright on the movie "Casablanca" that the underlying art comes from. Suppose there could be an Ingrid Bergman estate protecting use of her image, same for Bogie.
But let's get real...this movie came out in 1942 and is embedded so deeply in the American culture that to exercise absolute control over every image seems heavy-handed. No skin off my nose, it was a good exercise in design and I'll just move on to something else.
