DMCA

Last updated: October 7, 2026

Tee Willow sells illustrated apparel, so we take copyright seriously, both our own and everyone else’s. This page explains how to tell us if you believe something on teewillow.com copies your copyrighted work, what information we need, how quickly we act and how someone whose content was removed can respond. It follows the notice-and-takedown process of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512). For trademarks, likeness and other intellectual property concerns, see our Intellectual Property Policy.

At a glance

• Send copyright notices to support@teewillow.com with the subject line “Copyright notice”.
• Include all six elements listed in section 3 so we can act without delay.
• We acknowledge notices within 1 business day and review complete notices within 5 business days.
• Valid notices lead to the material being removed or disabled, and we confirm this by email.
• People whose content is removed can send a counter-notification, explained in section 6.

1. What this page covers

Tee Willow is a single-brand store. We do not host third-party sellers or a marketplace of user-uploaded designs. This page therefore covers material that appears on our own site, including:

• graphic designs and illustrations shown on product pages and printed on our garments;
• product photos, mock-up images, banners and other images;
• written content such as product descriptions, guides and policy pages;
• content submitted by customers, such as review text and review photos, if reviews are enabled;
• personalization text that customers ask us to print, to the extent it appears on the site, for example in a review photo.

If your concern is about a physical product you saw being sold somewhere else that copies a Tee Willow design, we want to hear about that too; email us with a link and we will follow it up with the platform concerned.

2. Before you send a notice

Copyright protects original creative expression, such as a particular drawing or photograph. It does not protect general ideas, common phrases, short slogans, typefaces as such, or simple shapes. Many seasonal motifs, such as a smiling pumpkin, a black cat in a witch hat or a paw print, are widely used ideas, and two artists can independently create different drawings of them. Before sending a notice, please compare the specific artwork carefully. If you are not sure whether something infringes your rights, you may wish to seek legal advice.

If the issue is about the use of a brand name, logo or character name rather than artwork, please use our Intellectual Property Policy process instead, because trademark concerns are handled under different rules.

3. How to send a copyright notice

Your written notice must include the following six elements, as required by 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3):

1. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or of a person authorised to act on the owner’s behalf. A typed full name at the end of an email is accepted as an electronic signature.
2. Identification of the copyrighted work you believe has been infringed. If several works are involved, a representative list is enough, but links to or images of the originals help us review faster.
3. Identification of the material on our site that you believe is infringing, with enough detail for us to find it. Please give the exact URL of each product page or image.
4. Your contact information: full name, postal address, telephone number and email address.
5. A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use of the material in the way complained of 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.

Send the notice by email to support@teewillow.com with the subject line “Copyright notice”, or by post to Tee Willow, 100 Pleasant Court, Newport News, VA 23602, United States. Email is much faster. Incomplete notices can delay our review; if something is missing, we will tell you what we need.

4. What we do when we receive a notice

1. Acknowledgement: we confirm receipt within 1 business day.
2. Review: we review complete notices within 5 business days. We compare the works and check that all six elements are present.
3. Action: if the notice is valid, we remove or disable access to the material, stop printing any affected design, and confirm this to you by email.
4. Notification: if the material was submitted by a customer, such as a review photo, we tell that person it was removed and give them a copy of the notice, with your personal contact details withheld where the law allows, so they can respond.
5. Records: we keep a record of the notice and our action for our files.

Removing material in response to a notice is not an admission that it infringed, and it does not affect any other remedies either party may have.

5. Timeline table

How Tee Willow handles a copyright notice

Stage	Our target time	What you receive
Notice received	Within 1 business day	Acknowledgement email
Review of a complete notice	Within 5 business days	Decision email, or a request for missing information
Removal of infringing material	Promptly after a valid notice is confirmed	Confirmation with the URLs removed
Counter-notification forwarded	Within 2 business days of receiving it	A copy of the counter-notification
Possible restoration	10 to 14 business days after forwarding	Notice of restoration, unless court action is reported

6. Counter-notification

If you submitted content to our site that was removed because of a copyright notice, and you believe it was removed by mistake or misidentification, you may send us a counter-notification. It must include:

1. your physical or electronic signature;
2. identification of the material that was removed and where it appeared before removal;
3. a statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good-faith belief the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification;
4. your name, postal address and telephone number;
5. a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for the judicial district in which your address is located, or, if your address is outside the United States, any judicial district in which Tee Willow may be found, and that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the original notice or their agent.

We forward a valid counter-notification to the person who sent the original notice. If they do not tell us within 10 business days that they have filed a court action seeking to restrain the activity, we may restore the material within 10 to 14 business days after receiving the counter-notification.

7. False or misleading notices

Under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f), any person who knowingly and materially misrepresents that material is infringing, or that material was removed by mistake, may be liable for damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees. Please only send a notice or counter-notification if you are confident in what you are stating.

8. Repeat infringement

We remove content from, and may close the accounts of, customers who repeatedly submit infringing material, such as review photos that copy someone else’s work. We also refuse personalization requests that would reproduce someone else’s copyrighted artwork or protected characters.

9. Our own designs

We only sell designs that are original or properly licensed for use on our products. If something we sell looks too close to your work, we would much rather hear about it and look into it than leave it on the site. Rights holders who contact us in good faith are treated with courtesy, and we keep them informed at each step.

If you believe one of our designs copies your work, we want to know, and we will treat your notice seriously and fairly. If you find our designs or product photos being used elsewhere without permission, email us with the link; we may send our own notice to that platform.

10. Personalized orders and copyrighted material

Customers sometimes ask us to print things we cannot print: a cartoon character, a band’s album artwork, a sports team’s crest, or a photo taken by a professional photographer without their permission. We decline these requests and refund the order in full, because printing them would infringe the rights of the people who created them. When a product offers personalization, the options are shown on its product page, and anything a customer submits must be theirs to use.

If you are a rights holder and you believe a customer review photo shows a garment printed with your work, please send a notice as described in section 3. We will review the photo and the order record and remove the photo if it infringes.

11. Example of a complete notice

To make things easier, here is the kind of information a complete notice contains, written in plain language. You do not need to use these exact words, but each point should be covered:

• “I am the artist who created the illustration titled (your title), first published on (where and when). A copy is attached.”
• “The following page on teewillow.com shows a design that copies my illustration: (full URL).”
• “My contact details are: (full name, postal address, phone number, email address).”
• “I have a good-faith belief that this use is not authorised by me, my agent or the law.”
• “The information in this notice is accurate, and under penalty of perjury I am the copyright owner.”
• “Signed: (typed full name), (date).”

Attaching an image of your original work and, if available, evidence of when it was first published, such as a dated portfolio post, helps us reach a decision quickly.

12. Notices from outside the United States

We accept notices from copyright owners anywhere. If you are in Canada, Australia, New Zealand or elsewhere, you may send a notice in the same format even if your local law uses a different process. We review it on the same timeline. Canada’s notice-and-notice regime and similar regimes are generally aimed at internet service providers; as an online store, we act on credible notices directly.

13. Contact

For copyright matters, email support@teewillow.com with the subject “Copyright notice”. For general questions, visit Contact Us. See also our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.