thanks for clarifying – I just wanted to add 2 points to the discussion:

1. re “path of least resistance” – if you know german law, you know that you have to pay *instantly* high fines, even on a cease & desist letter – especially when offending personal rights. so this process is to protect us and the owner of the shop. and especially in the context of t-shirts, because:

2. “informing the public” – this is actually the critical point. t-shirts aren’t treated as a medium – but as merchandise. so it’s a different story if you print things in a paper (well, even papers have to pay fines sometimes) and if you “inform the public” by offering shirts, selling them, advertising them and actually making money etc. with the portrait of another person on it. chances still are high that a judge doesn’t get the context. (there are other cases in that area, and like joerg said, it’s very complex, but we hope it gets better).

sorry, again, for any inconvenience – and believe me, it’s not that we like doing this :/

Someone asked me if I can confirm that this German law/rule exists and I looked into a bit further. It is very complicated and slightly odd and I can’t explain the whole situation here, but I will summarise.

Detailed information (in German) is here: http://www.law-blog.de/229/personen-der-zeitgeschichte/

Any private person has to agree to the publication of a picture. This is different for public persons. Originally the german courts differentiated between absolute person of current history and relative person of current history.

The first type is a person that is known because of their existence and what they have done (a politician, a scientist, an actor, business leader, etc) the second type is a person that only became known in the context of a certain news story (a solicitor in a big case). Pictures of the first category could be published without any hesitation, Pictures of the second category could be published if in context with the story they became famous for, but their private life was off-limits.

The European Court of Human Rights disagreed with this interpretation and said that even the first category should have some privacy rights.

This screwed up the nice categorisation and confused the hell out of the non-experts (AND most experts) to a degree that they tend to go over the top and are afraid now. So Spreadshirt is following the confused and over-the-top interpretation. They are probably not right, but because the situation is not clear, only a court of law could decide what is right or wrong and to risk that would mean to risk the high cost of a court case which is something many would shy away from.

Even more complication is added by the fact that all photos (even the ones from absolute persons of current history) are only to be used for the purpose of informing the public. If the purpose is another one (e.g. advertisement) the use of a photo has to be granted by the rights holder (the person on the picture).

With all that in mind, Spreadshirt is seemingly choosing the path of least resistance.

There are many situations where the laws and the decisions of the European and German courts do make sense, BUT on the flip side it unduly interferes with the freedom of speech in other areas.

I hope this explains!

–Joerg

The shirts are live again on Spreadshirt. Sean is correct, there is a question of interpretation, as most law is. Our team did the right thing, and disabled the design. Due to the escalation, we (the management team) reviewed this further and decided that in this case, as he is a public figure and this concerns a statement on freedom of speech, we would enable this design. We will continue to review it with our legal team next week.

Regarding the other designs, there are some questions in this group and we will review them. We cannot review every design uploaded, and act when we are alerted to issues. In this case, Allan himself raised the design to us, as some other people were using it. Upon reviewing the design the team made their decision to disable all of them.

Obama specifically is a different case. In the US, the laws are different in that public officials, because they are paid by the tax payers, do not have the rights that other citizens do. Their image is allowed to be used without permission. There are some limitation though. You might have heard about the case involving the “Hope” picture, as it is similar to a photo that was taken and their are questions whether recasting that photo is allowable under copyright laws. So you might be able to use your photo of the president, but other people cannot copy that specific photo. Will be interesting how it plays out.

I wish you all well!
Jana