Re: "The Greek alphabet is currently protected legally"
Sensible t-shirt printers can NOT operate on the scale that spring does. How do I know, I was there since the beginning and was there as all these systems were built at spring.
Traditional screen printing has a single design printed a bunch to be profitable where spring started to get into short run screen (10 units) which most screen shops would turn away as not profitable. This is exponentially easier to police.
Eventually the advances in digital printing allowed for this revolution of the short run high color count shirts that you see blasted all over social media now. Spring ripped out all its screens, and replaced them with state of the art digital printers. I use the word revolution because it was that, you could now profitably produce and sell digital goods that did not exist in the real world that only got produced on demand if a purchase was made. No storing and destroying unsold designs.
Now this created an even bigger problem of thousands of unique designs being uploaded every day. These designs in turn could get automatically uploaded to other marketplaces (amazon, walmart, ebay, wish, etc). How do you police that? They learn the hardway (See Teespring scandal's on wikipedia for some examples) -- its laughable at how offended this person in the article got at Teespring doing the correct thing of removing it followed by reinstating after a human evaluation. If you saw some of the awful hateful subtle things that gets through -- that also would have gotten through a screen operation.
Blanket keyword tagging isn't even the beginning to manage a self service upload platform with millions of designs. First layer of defense is keyword flagging. Second would be AI and Machine Learning to watch for infringing and trademark designs. Third would be a dual person trust and safety system manually swiping left or right for "OK" or "NO" on EVERY design. They literally built a TINDER for tshirts. Hell we even worked on systems to get headline feeds so the second a celebrity passed the trust&safety team could prevent people from 'profiting' on the death of someone.
I don't know what Teesprings volume is today, I'm sure I could make a call to find out but I'm proud of how far that company has come. To quote a stranger in an uber once called it to me reminiscing on the early days "The wild west of Teespring" to a company that has built and found a way to manage a user generated upload system at scale and invested heavily in technology, people, and process to keep the platform safe.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
