(Updated) Image blocked on print-on-demand site

andrewburgonandrewburgon Posts: 16
edited September 2022 in Art Studio

Hi guys,

This is an update to what happened to my image on Cafe Press. As I mentioned before, my image was blocked.  I did hear back from someone at the company. It turns out my image was blocked because of the "usage or likeness of Dungeons and Dragons in your design and/or tag words." I did use 'dnd' and 'dungeonsanddragons' in my tags. Bad boy. I didn't realise that tags were of such a sensitive nature! As for the image, the character had long hair and face paint. DnD have a huge collection of images. If Cafe Press has fed them into some kind of algorithm to vet out similar images I'm going to have to be careful what I submit. Here is what I've learned that may be helpful to others.

1. Not to use any tags like "DnD," "World of Warcraft," etc. Think of it as intellectual property even if you think of it as 'just a tag.'

2. The face paint I used is from a character in the Daz store.  If you are doing fantasy pics of staple fantasy characters and there is something very unusual and distinctive about the character you want to purchase you might want to save the product's image and do an image search for similar images. I think in most cases this isn't necessary, however.... After my image was blocked, I searched for similar images to the product I bought in the Daz store, Nothing came up. When I did a general search for DnD images later, I came across a DnD character who had the same very distinctive feature as the character in the Daz store. If I did a straight render of that character and put it on Cafe Press there is a good chance it would be blocked. 

Having said all that, I think it was my tags that got my image blocked and not so much the image itself. (I only used the face paint of the product in question and not the really distinctive feature. ) I will make a change to the scene and render it again.

Well, that's it for this nube. Back to creating some more images. If you have similar experiences, please consider sharing so we can avoid having our images blocked. Cheers.

Post edited by Richard Haseltine on

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