Etsy IP Takedowns by the Numbers: What the 2025 Transparency Report Reveals About Your Real Risk

Etsy published its 2025 Transparency Report on 1 July 2026. Almost nobody in the seller community has read it, because it looks like a compliance document written for regulators — and it largely is.

But buried in it are the only hard numbers Etsy has ever published about how intellectual property enforcement actually works on the platform. Not seller anecdotes. Not Reddit horror stories. Etsy's own count of how many reports it received, how many it threw out, how many listings came down, and how many shops it closed.

The numbers tell a story that contradicts what most sellers believe about their risk. Here it is.

The headline: IP enforcement is moving opposite to everything else

The single most important thing in the report is a divergence that Etsy never explicitly points out.

General policy enforcement got dramatically lighter. Listing removals for policy violations fell roughly 49% in 2025 compared to 2024, driven mainly by fewer Creativity Standards removals. Etsy attributes this to better detection upstream — fewer bad listings getting published in the first place.

Intellectual property enforcement went the other way. Etsy processed around 111,000 alleged infringement reports in 2025 — a 30% increase on 2024.

So if your mental model is "Etsy eased off in 2025," you are half right and dangerously half wrong. Etsy eased off on handmade/reselling enforcement. Rights-holder pressure grew by nearly a third.

This matters because the two systems are completely separate. Creativity Standards enforcement is Etsy policing its own marketplace. IP enforcement is third parties — brands, artists, licensing agents — pointing at your listing and demanding it come down. Etsy getting more relaxed about the first tells you nothing about your exposure to the second.

111,000 reports, 846,000 listings

Here is the ratio that should get your attention.

Etsy processed ~111,000 infringement reports. Total listing removals in the IP channel stayed roughly flat at approximately 846,000.

That is around 7.6 listings removed per report.

IP reports are not one-listing-at-a-time events. A single submission through the Etsy Reporting Portal routinely sweeps up a whole batch of listings — and, if enough of them are yours, a whole shop. Rights-holders and their enforcement agents file in bulk because the portal is explicitly built for it: Etsy's own description notes users can "report multiple listings at once, and track the status of their reports."

The practical consequence: the thing you should fear is not the complaint, it's the sweep. If you have twelve listings using the same font, the same character, the same catchphrase, they are not twelve independent risks. They are one risk with twelve heads. One agent, one afternoon, one submission.

This is exactly why we've argued that auditing your shop before someone else does beats fighting takedowns after the fact. The report puts a number on it.

What sellers actually get hit for

Etsy breaks IP takedowns down by type:

• Copyright — 64% of takedowns
• Trademark — 33%
• Patent — ~0%
• Other — 3%

Copyright is roughly two-thirds of all IP takedowns. This is the reverse of what most sellers expect. The seller community talks about trademark constantly — trademarked phrases, brand names in titles, "can I say Stanley?" — and comparatively little about copyright.

But copyright is where the volume is. Copyright covers the artwork, the character, the photograph, the pattern, the font file, the song lyric, the SVG you bought. Trademark covers the name. And sellers are twice as likely to be taken down for the image as for the word.

If you sell print-on-demand, digital downloads, or anything derived from purchased design files, this is your category. Read what a commercial licence actually does and doesn't cover, because the gap between "I bought a licence" and "I own the rights" is where a large share of that 64% lives.

Patent claims round to zero. Design patent scares are real but statistically rare — worth understanding if you sell dupes or accessories, but not where your baseline risk sits.

18% of reports get rejected — and that number is shrinking

Etsy rejected 18% of submitted IP infringement reports in 2025, where it couldn't verify authorisation, the IP description was insufficient, or the report otherwise failed requirements.

Two ways to read this.

The hopeful read: nearly one in five complaints against sellers is defective enough that Etsy kills it before it ever touches a listing. Bogus claims do get filtered.

The realistic read: that rejection rate fell 20% from the previous year. Etsy attributes the decline to "enhanced requirements for authorized reporters" in the Reporting Portal — meaning the portal now front-loads verification, so junk claims get screened at submission rather than counted as rejections.

Translated: the filter moved earlier in the pipeline. The reports that reach you are, on average, better prepared than they used to be. The era of the trivially-defective takedown you could get dismissed on a technicality is closing. Claimants are being coached by the system into filing properly.

Do not build your defence around the hope that the complaint is malformed. Build it around whether you can actually prove your design is original or properly licensed.

Only 10% of sellers fight back

This is the most revealing statistic in the entire report.

When Etsy removes a listing on a copyright report, the seller can file a DMCA counter-notice. In 2025, sellers filed counter-notices for just 10% of copyright infringement reports.

Ninety percent of sellers take the hit and walk away.

Now — that is not automatically wrong. Plenty of takedowns are legitimate, and a counter-notice on a claim you'd lose is a bad idea with real legal consequences: it exposes your identity and contact details to the claimant and invites a federal lawsuit. We've written a decision framework for when to fight and when to accept, and "accept" is frequently the correct answer.

But 90% is a very high number. It is not plausible that 90% of takedowns are open-and-shut. What it more likely reflects is that sellers don't know the counter-notice exists, don't understand the deadline, or are frightened of a process they've never had explained to them.

The encouraging counter-trend: counter-notice filings were up 16% year over year. Sellers are slowly learning. If you're in a position to contest one, here's how the counter-notice process actually works, and here's how long you have to respond.

28,000 shops closed

Etsy closed approximately 28,000 shops in 2025 for repeat infringement and/or counterfeiting — an increase of 3.8% over 2024. Separately, it removed about 180,000 listings flagged as potential counterfeits by its own internal systems.

Twenty-eight thousand shops. Against 5.6 million active sellers, that's roughly 1 in 200 shops closed for IP reasons in a single year.

That is the real number behind "repeat infringer." It is not a theoretical policy — it is an outcome that happened to 28,000 businesses last year, and the rate is climbing while total policy removals fall. If you want to know how close you are to that line, read how many strikes it actually takes.

Where the complaints come from

IP takedowns by reporter region:

• North America — 54% of reports
• Europe — 32%
• Asia — 7%
• Rest of world — 7%

More than half of all IP reports originate from North American rights-holders. If you sell US-facing designs — American brands, US sports, US entertainment IP — you are selling into the region that generates the majority of enforcement activity, regardless of where you're based.

Non-US sellers frequently assume distance is protection. It isn't. The report is filed against the listing, and the listing lives on Etsy's servers under US law. Being an international seller doesn't insulate you from US trademark and copyright claims.

One statistic sellers will misread

Etsy reports that 98% of listing flags came from Etsy's own systems and only 2% from the community.

You will see this quoted as "competitors barely report anyone — it's all bots." That conclusion is wrong, and the error matters.

That 98/2 split describes policy-violation flags — Etsy's Trust & Safety machinery detecting Creativity Standards breaches, prohibited items, and similar. It does not describe IP takedowns. IP reports arrive through an entirely different channel: the Reporting Portal, filed by rights-holders and their agents. They are not in that 98%.

So the accurate statement is: policy enforcement is now almost entirely automated, while IP enforcement remains overwhelmingly a human, adversarial, third-party process. Both can end your shop. They behave nothing alike, and they require different defences. If a brand's enforcement agent is monitoring your niche, no amount of Etsy's improved automated precision helps you.

What's coming in 2026

The report sets out Etsy's roadmap, and three items directly affect IP-exposed sellers.

Listing-level appeals are expanding. Etsy introduced listing-level appeals in 2025, initially limited to Creativity Standards violations. It now plans to "scale the system to include our broader policy ecosystem," stating: "Our goal is to have broad appeals coverage by the end of this year." This is the most seller-friendly commitment in the document. If it lands, a removed listing stops being a dead end. Track it on your Policy Violations page — that's where appeal options surface as they roll out.

Enforcement notifications are getting more specific. Etsy says it launched "more targeted enforcement notifications" for Creativity Standards and Prohibited Items, and will expand them across more policy areas in 2026. The perennial seller complaint — "they removed my listing and won't tell me why" — is being addressed, slowly.

LLM detection is being pointed at AI imagery. Etsy explicitly names "the misleading use of AI imagery" as a new abuse trend it is building detection for. If you use AI-generated product photos or mockups, this is a direct warning shot. Etsy improved overall enforcement precision by 10% year over year with LLM-based systems, and is now aiming them here. Understand the synthetic media rules before your listing photos become the violation.

What to actually do with this

The data supports a fairly specific set of priorities:

1. Treat copyright as your primary exposure, not trademark. It's 64% of takedowns. Audit your images, artwork, fonts, patterns and purchased design files before you audit your titles for brand names.
2. Assume bulk, not one-off. At 7.6 listings per report, a claimant who finds one of your listings finds all of them. De-risk clusters, not individual items.
3. Stop counting on defective complaints. The rejection rate is falling because the portal now coaches claimants into filing correctly.
4. Know whether you'd counter-notice before you get hit. Ninety percent of sellers don't file — many because they've never thought it through. Decide your position while you're calm.
5. If you're near a repeat-infringer threshold, act now. 28,000 shops closed last year and that number is rising, against a backdrop of falling overall enforcement.
6. Watch the appeals rollout. Broad listing-level appeals by end of 2026 would be the single biggest structural improvement in seller protection Etsy has shipped.

The uncomfortable conclusion

Etsy's report is, on its face, a good-news document: removals down 49%, precision up 10%, spam down 74%, appeals expanding.

For most sellers, it is. For sellers with IP exposure, it isn't. Every trend line that improved describes Etsy's internal policing. The one line that describes external, adversarial, rights-holder pressure — 111,000 reports, up 30% — went the wrong way, and the shops-closed number went up with it.

Etsy is getting better at not punishing you by mistake. It is not getting better at protecting you from brands who want your listings gone. Those are different problems, and only one of them is yours to solve.

ShieldMyShop scans your live listings for the exposure a rights-holder's enforcement agent would find first — brand terms in titles, tags and image filenames, and the design clusters that turn one complaint into a shop-wide sweep. Start a free trial and see your shop the way a claimant sees it. ������������������������������������