# Licensing Your Content - trying to understand the cafepress and zazzle TOS



## breakaway (Jun 26, 2008)

I've looked at Cafepress and Zazzle, their terms of service are kind of vague. Has anyone had any problems with their terms of service?

Here is Cafepress':

"4.3 Licensing Your Content to CafePress.com. You will retain ownership of the Content that you upload to the Website. You hereby grant to CafePress.com a royalty-free, worldwide, transferable, nonexclusive, right and license to use such Content, in all media existing now or created in the future, as CafePress.com deems necessary to enable you to use the Create & Buy Service to create, produce and purchase Products. CafePress.com may sublicense the rights that you grant it in this Section to a third party subcontractor only for purposes of providing the CafePress.com Service, processing your order, and producing and shipping your Products. "

If I interpret that right, it means that if I take off my design or close a store, then they can't show my designs anymore since they wouldn't be providing me with a serivce.

The Zazzle one is a little more confusing:

"You retain all ownership rights to your Content. However, by submitting Content to Zazzle, you grant Zazzle a nonexclusive, worldwide, transferable license to copy, crop, reproduce, publicly display, and distribute your Content."

It goes into a little more detail. But basically if you make a design or something and they like it, they can use an image of it for advertising purposes for their own site even after you've deleted it.


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

*Re: Licensing Your Content*

With CafePress, it's just saying that they need your permission to print t-shirts for you with your design.

Once you close your store or ask them not to, then they won't anymore. It's not really an issue.

They may also use your image on their website (like in their very popular shopping destination "The Marketplace"). So if they think your design is cool, they may feature it in one of their newsletters to shoppers (and get you more sales) or they may feature it on their website in their marketplace and credit you (and get you more sales)


With Zazzle it's a bit trickier. Zazzle seems to reserve the right to still use your design even if you delete your store. They make it a bit harder to remove your images from their marketplace (you have to email them and it's a more manual process). I was told that this was to allow customers to be able to find the same product again easily if they want to repurchase, but there has to be better ways around that.


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