The Big Ban Hammer

Just three short days after announcing the launch of the Eveoganda Store on Zazzle, the mighty CCP Legal Department issued an official ban and demanded Zazzle take down ALL of the merchandise from the now empty store front.

As a life-long advocate for artist's rights I am well aware of the rules regarding copyright infringement, cease and desist orders, trademark, international agreements, the whole ball of wax. It would never be my intention to violate the rights of a rights holder. Having said that, there is a huge wall of gray out here in the internet. A huge wall of gray that results in:

This t-shirt still being sold on Zazzle.

This t-shirt still being sold on Zazzle.

Do a search for Eve Online on Zazzle and it comes back with 13 pages of items. And Zazzle is just one source. Do the search yourself on google and see what happens. Shirts on Cafe Press. An entire store front over on Red Bubble with actual lifted art directly from CCP. The results are rather long and involve every on-line merchandise re-seller.

I could go on and on. All of these items up and being sold before my store went live and still up and running after my store was brought down.

I want to be clear, I started asking CCP for clarification over 18 months ago. I was in contact during this past week, once more asking for clarification on the guidelines for selling ORIGINAL materials "based on" properties clearly owned by CCP. And I have yet to receive a direct answer. I have heard nothing from them. Only the notification from Zazzle, "We have been contacted by representatives from CCP Games and EVE Online, and at their request,  have removed the product from the Zazzle Marketplace."

Keep in mind that there are literally hundreds of other, more obvious rights violators, still selling on-line.

They took down everything. Even the dancing pods from the Eve Dumb Ways to Die video, which has brought in nearly 120,000 views and was hand-drawn by myself. Even the Stay Frosty logo which is NOT used in-game and which is an original creation by myself, clearly something CCP has NO rights to AT ALL. Stay Frosty is not something CCP can lay claim to, since it originally appeared as dialogue in the film Aliens, Stay Frosty has become a classic, shared, public domain saying.

Obviously I am a bit different. As usual I can't do anything half-assed. My designs are excellent and I had a very aggressive plan to roll out new products on a daily basis. I promoted the store here, on Twitter, in forums, in my in-game bio, everywhere. I did this because I am in-between jobs out here in the real world and now seemed like a good time to try and monetize my five year investment in Eve.

I am more than willing to play by the rules, but as of today, I still do not know what those rules are. And why they seem to pertain only to me. Meanwhile, I am earning nothing from my investment, others are still making monetary gains from theirs. I don't need to tell you that I see this as grossly unfair and a slightly aggressive stance against perhaps the greatest on-line champion of Eve that CCP has. Namely me.*

*I'm not trying to inflate my own self-worth here, but it would be hard to argue this fact.

If the stance from CCP is simply that nothing even remotely related to Eve can be re-sold on the internet, then fine. But why are hundreds of other products still being sold? If tolerance is zero, then so be it, but it needs to be applied to everyone. Not just to the really talented one over here in the corner.

I went ahead with the store because I hadn't heard boo from anyone telling me to stop. I was fully aware of what might happen and looked forward to hearing from someone telling me what the rules are. Instead I got an invisible giant hammer and silence.

I feel a little picked on frankly.

While even AMAZON offers Eve Shirts clearly not sanctioned by CCP.

Or this ACTUAL EVE logo sticker!!