This is the offending photograph that was pulled from a POD (Print on Demand) site. I dared to include the Space Needle in my Seattle Skyline.

The Seattle Seahawks won the 2014 Super Bowl. Maybe that woke up some other Powers-That-Be in Seattle, because the Space Needle entity has come down on little designers who used the Space Needle in their designs on a commercial Print-on-Demand (POD) site I use. (“Super Bowl” might even be a copyrighted phrase.)  I got the dreaded emails telling me of “copyright infringement” on six products all using the above photograph.

The Space Needle is a copyrighted structure, so it can’t be featured in photographs and art, but it can be included as part of a skyline. It’s such an essential part of the skyline, it seems wrong to be so restrictive in its use. I knew that I couldn’t feature the Space Needle as…