Babble & Copyrights
t’s been a very busy week. Wednesday night, I took the dogs on a field trip out to my parents’ house, visited with them, my sister-in-law, niece, and nephew, and got some baby trees from my dad. Thursday, I planted the trees in the back yard. They’re pin cherry trees, which grow like weeds. I also did about half a ton of laundry over my days off, and plenty of house cleaning. That was fun.
Meanwhile, thanks to a useless dishwasher, I hurt my back again. I had to do the sweep and mop for said useless dishwasher on Monday and Tuesday. Sweeping’s not so bad, but dragging that heavy-assed wet mop around is no fun. Of course, I probably aggravated the situation by digging holes for trees on Thursday. All of that made Friday quite entertaining. 
My back was killing me all night. Then, of course, last night the cook I have on loan from day shift screwed me over, again, by contriving another excuse not to be at work. Day shift can have his ass back — he’s of no worth to me. I have enough problems in my kitchen without adding in a whiny cook who pisses everyone off and isn’t reliable.
I’ve pretty much ignored the news for the last few days — needed a break from all the bad news, really. I have to do that once in awhile, otherwise I might end up in a clock tower. One point of excitement was an email I got from CafePress, where my store is hosted. Apparently, one of my images — the zombie smiley — was flagged for copyright violation.
Dear Shopkeeper,
We have received a warning from Universal with regard to content that may infringe upon their rights with regard to their television and movie properties. Please be clearly advised that we are taking a strong position in preventing any material that may be utilizing content derived from their properties.
Universal is taking a very aggressive approach with regard to your content. As you know, pursuant to the Shopkeeper Agreement you are ultimately responsible for your content and may be required to reimburse CafePress.com for any expenses incurred with regard to your content. Accordingly, in an effort to protect you and CafePress.com from potential liability we have the pended some of your images which prevents such images from being used on products in conjunction with the CafePress Service.
We realize that there may be some content that was pended purely because of the tags that they utilized. If you feel your content was wrongly pended, please contact the Content Usage department at cup@cafepress.com.
Please do not reupload content that has been pended.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Unless Universal has copyrighted the phrase, “Shhhh! There Might Be Zombies!”, I can’t think of any reason why this image would be a violation. It’s drawn by hand in Photoshop, and I didn’t swipe the idea or any part of the image from anywhere. I’m assuming that, since the smiley was flagged for violation, but my second zombie design, the stick figure that incorporates the smiley, was not flagged, the whole situation has to do with the image tags I used for the images at CafePress. The searchable tags for the smiley are: dead, funny, george romero, halloween, horror, humorous, living dead, Night of the Living Dead, oddball, offbeat, resident evil, scary, shaun of the dead, spooky, strange, undead, Walking Dead, weird, zombie, zombies. However, for the stick figure, I have: humor, living dead, original, totebag, zombie.
I’m sure you see the difference. The image that got flagged uses the names of several properties of Universal — Night of the Living Dead, George Romero, etc, as tags, whereas the other does not. I had used all the movie tags so that anyone looking for zombie things would find my design, too, but got lazy on the tags for the stick figure. Heh. I’ve contacted CafePress about it, so hopefully they release my design to be used again, soon.
