All Your Cats Are Belong To George Lucas

George, honey — can I  call you George? no? I can call you honey though; I’m from the South and we just get sweeter the madder we are… Love your heart. It has come to my attention that Zazzle.com thinks you own the Intellectual Property rights to pictures of my mom’s cat. What in heaven’s name gave them that impression? Here is what they emailed me:

“Reason Not Approved: Content Partner – Design contains content that violates the intellectual property rights of Zazzle’s brand partners. For a comprehensive list of Zazzle’ s brand partners, please visit: http://www.zazzle.com/brands ”

When I tried to upload this:

Hilarious, no?

This is an image I photoshopped from a picture I took of my mom’s cat, Plumpy, and a photo of a cave taken by talldude07 which was under a creative commons license. I am referencing the Star Wars Universe  as a satire in the style of the lolcats meme. I have misspelled all trademarked names (in the style of the lolcats who have horrible spelling) and refrained from tagging the image or product with any trademarked names or phrases (such as ‘star wars’).

So explain to me why someone else would own the IP rights to this??

Here is what Copyright Law thinks about that:

“the fair dealing exceptions under the Copyright Act 1968 are a limited set of circumstances under which copyrighted material can be legally copied or adapted without the copyright holder’s consent. Fair dealing uses are research and study; review and critique; parody and satire; news reportage and the giving of professional advice (i.e. legal advice).” [emphasis mine]

Now, that would make it OK for me to use someone else’s copyrighted image, art, or text in this context — WHICH I AM NOT EVEN DOING.  Because nothing in this image has been copyrighted by anyone. Except for me, damn it; I declare copyright on it since I created it and thought of it. So There.

The upshot is zazzle.com is erring on the side of extreme caution. They are prohibiting anything that references, parodies, or satirizes ANYTHING that ANYONE thought of EVER. Which they have every right to do, but should explain in their guidelines (which I would link to if I wasn’t in such a blind rage that I have forgotten my log in info). I am going to tell them so in their little feedback survey once I calm down.

Cafepress, however, has no such paranoid hangups :p so you can buy a Jobba the Catt shirt there. F U, zazzle. F. U.

You see, George honey, I’m not really even mad at you. I know you had nothing to do with this and I adore your creative little mind… but Han DID shoot first and nothing you can digitally edit and remaster will ever convince me otherwise… love your heart.