Estate Of George Orwell Demands Takedown Of “1984” T-Shirt Designs

George Orwell’s 1984 imagined a bleak bureaucratic future where free speech was easily inhibited. Perhaps the people who run his estate should read the book; or at least brush up on copyright basics.

TorrentFreak reports that the Orwell estate successfully petitioned CafePress to remove a handful of T-shirt designs that used a photo of the numbers “1984.”

As you can see from the above screengrab, there is also some scribbling that declares “is already here” in addition to the numbers, but we’re pretty sure that’s not a copyrightable quote from the Orwell novel.

What’s definitely not copyrightable is the mere number “1984.”

U.S. Copyright Office regulations declare [PDF] that “words and short phrases” are not copyrightable.

“Similarly, individual numbers, letters, sounds, and short phrases consisting of such elements are not copyrightable, because they do not contain sufficient creative authorship,” according to the Copyright folks.

The copyright notice sent to Cafe Press referred to “George Orwell quotes” as being the offending content, but even if the phrase “is already here” is somewhere in the book 1984 (Disclosure: we haven’t had the time to re-read the book this afternoon), it’s such a generic phrase and so short in length that it most certainly does not merit copyright protection.

And this does not appear to be the work of some overzealous computer program that spits out copyright takedown claims willy-nilly.

In fact, a rep for the estate attempted to justify the takedown demand to TorrentFreak.

“The estate has never licensed merchandising, nor have the licensees of the relevant film rights, under which merchandising usually comes. Some of the merchandising I asked to be taken down was in clear breach of copyright,” explained the rep.

We’ve reached out to this rep to follow up, pointing out the lack of copyright protection for a mere number. We’ve also attempted to contact Cafe Press’s intellectual property department to find out (A) why it obliged this demand from the Orwell estate, and (B) if the website does any actual investigation into copyright claims before taking content down.

If we hear anything back from either party, we’ll update.