Can You Sell Disney Fundraiser Shirts on Etsy? The 'It's for Charity' Myth

The message usually arrives in a shop's inbox rather than a listing. A room parent, a youth coach, a woman whose sister is in treatment. They want forty shirts. The design is Mickey ears made of pink ribbons, or a castle silhouette with a kid's name under it, and the listing will say — in bold, right at the top of the description — 100% of proceeds go to St. Jude.

Nobody is trying to get away with anything. The seller is often taking home nothing at all, sometimes losing money on shipping. And the reasoning feels airtight: this isn't commerce, it's a fundraiser. Disney is not being deprived of a sale to a family who was never buying an official shirt in the first place. Surely the one situation where a giant company doesn't come after you is the one where the money goes to sick children.

That reasoning is better than most Etsy myths. It has a statute behind it. It just doesn't do what sellers think it does.

The honest half: the law really does care whether you're a nonprofit

Start with how much of this is true, because it's more than usual.

The fair use statute says it in so many words. 17 U.S.C. § 107 asks courts to weigh "the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes." A seller who read the statute and concluded that nonprofit purpose counts in their favour read it correctly. It is right there in factor one.

The Supreme Court has also refused to hold commerciality against defendants automatically. In Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, 510 U.S. 569 (1994), the Court rejected the idea that a commercial use is presumptively unfair, and insisted the four factors be weighed together rather than counted. Fair use is a case-by-case inquiry, and the character of your use genuinely is part of it.

Etsy explicitly permits charity fundraising. There is a whole policy page for it — Donating Shop Proceeds to Charity. You are not sneaking around a rule. The platform has written the rule and it says yes.

And brands really do give things to charities. Disney donates thousands of theme park tickets annually to schools and nonprofits, and runs a wish-granting programme for children with life-threatening medical conditions. This is not a company with no charitable channel.

So the seller's instinct — there is a carve-out here somewhere — is not paranoid or lazy. There is a carve-out. It's just in a different body of law from the one that's going to bite them.

The flip: three moves

1. Trademark law has no nonprofit exception. None.

The fair use factors the seller read are copyright law. The Mickey silhouette on the shirt is also, and more dangerously, a trademark problem — and the Lanham Act contains no equivalent of § 107's nonprofit language anywhere in it.

Section 32 and § 43(a) (15 U.S.C. §§ 1114, 1125(a)) ask whether your use is likely to cause confusion "in connection with the sale, offering for sale, distribution, or advertising of any goods or services." Not profitable sale. Sale. You are running an Etsy listing with a price and a checkout button; you are squarely inside the statutory language before anyone asks where the money goes afterwards.

If you think that's a technicality, courts have addressed the argument head-on. In United We Stand America, Inc. v. United We Stand, America New York, Inc., 128 F.3d 86 (2d Cir. 1997), the defendants argued their political activities weren't "services" under the Lanham Act because they weren't a business. The Second Circuit rejected it, noting that courts had already applied the Act to organisations that solicit donations, hold public meetings and organise on behalf of members — and that a nonprofit can be entitled to Lanham Act protection for its name even without placing products into the stream of commerce. Nonprofits are inside trademark law, not outside it. That cuts both ways, and one of those ways is you.

2. On the copyright side, "nonprofit" is an input, not a shield

Factor one helps you. It does not decide the case, and the Supreme Court has explained precisely why in language worth memorising:

"The crux of the profit/nonprofit distinction is not whether the sole motive of the use is monetary gain but whether the user stands to profit from exploitation of the copyrighted material without paying the customary price." — Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539, 562 (1985)

Read that against a fundraiser shirt. The entire economics of the shirt depend on not paying the customary price — the licence fee an official Disney charity partner pays. The design is doing commercial work; you have simply routed the margin to a good cause. Under Harper & Row, that's the exploitation the factor is asking about, not the destination of the cheque.

And if you want to see how far nonprofit status gets you when the other factors go badly: in Worldwide Church of God v. Philadelphia Church of God, 227 F.3d 1110 (9th Cir. 2000), a nonprofit religious organisation copied an out-of-print religious book in full and distributed it free to its members. Nonprofit copier, nonprofit purpose, free distribution, out-of-print work — the district court found fair use. The Ninth Circuit reversed and held as a matter of law that fair use did not apply. That is a considerably more sympathetic set of facts than forty screen-printed shirts, and it lost.

3. "Nonprofit educational" means teaching, not "the money went somewhere nice"

The phrase in § 107 is a term of art pointing at classrooms, scholarship, criticism and news reporting. It has never meant "any use whose proceeds are donated." A shirt is not a lesson. The word "educational" is doing as much work in that clause as "nonprofit," and sellers reading the statute quickly tend to drop it.

The kill shot: Disney wrote down what it thinks of your fundraiser

Here is the part sellers never look for, and it takes about ninety seconds to find. Disney publishes its Global Charitable Giving Guidelines (the current version is dated April 2025). It is a public PDF. It contains a list headed "Organizations Disney May Not Support," and two lines on that list are aimed directly at this listing:

• "Individuals fundraising for organizations (e.g., walk-a-thons, contests, etc.)"
• "Organizations that are raising funds to give to another charity."

Then, in the section on in-kind donations, the sentence that closes the loop:

"Items donated to an organization are for charitable purposes only and may not be marketed or resold, with the exception of charitable fundraising auctions."

Sit with that. In the one documented channel where Disney merchandise legitimately reaches a charity — Disney handing goods over itself — the written terms forbid reselling them, with a single narrow exception for auctions. The company's own charitable-giving document, the friendliest document it publishes about causes, says the individual fundraiser is out of scope and the donated goods may not be sold.

You do not have to guess whether a brand is relaxed about your cause. Read the brand's guidelines: they are published, they are short, and they are unambiguous.

The generalisable move: before you assume a brand will look the other way for a good cause, search for its charitable giving guidelines, brand usage guidelines, or licensing FAQ. Most large brands publish all three. The answer to "would they mind?" is usually written down, and it is usually no.

Two enforcement stories that ought to end the argument

Disney and the day care murals, 1989. Three day care centres in Hallandale, Florida had five-foot painted likenesses of Mickey, Minnie and Goofy on their walls. Disney demanded removal and threatened court. The murals were painted over. Universal Studios Florida and Hanna-Barbera then offered the centres their own characters — Scooby-Doo, the Flintstones, the Jetsons, Yogi Bear — and held a ceremony with costumed characters in August 1989.

Be honest about that story: Universal's motive was publicity, and it worked. But look at the underlying facts from a seller's point of view. Nothing was being sold. Nobody was making money. The beneficiaries were preschoolers. And it still went. "But it's for kids" and "but nobody profits" were both true, and neither was a defence. (Snopes has the full account and rates it true.)

The charity that went after other charities. In 2010, Susan G. Komen's enforcement of "for the Cure" became a story in its own right, after small cancer charities running events called Kites for a Cure, Par for the Cure, Cupcakes for a Cure and Surfing for a Cure received objections. Reporting at the time put the number of small charities challenged at more than a hundred; Komen's own response cited 16 legal oppositions against other charities plus 31 objections against for-profit groups, and its legal expenses for fiscal 2010 were reported at $515,405.

Whichever number you prefer, the point survives: the marks at issue (including SUSAN G. KOMEN RACE FOR THE CURE, U.S. Reg. No. 3,424,712, filed 1 August 2006 and registered 6 May 2008) are registered for charitable fundraising services, and they were enforced against people whose entire purpose was charitable fundraising. If "we're a charity" were a defence, that dispute could not have existed. The organisations on the receiving end were charities too.

The layer nobody sees: you need permission from two rights holders

Read Etsy's charity policy closely and one requirement jumps out:

"You must receive the appropriate consent from the charitable organization to use their name and trademark."

The charity's name is itself a trademark. Writing "100% of proceeds to St. Jude" in your description is trademark use of St. Jude's mark, and Etsy's own policy conditions your listing on having their consent. So the fundraiser shirt carries two separate permission problems: the brand on the front, and the charity in the description. Sellers spend all their anxiety on the first and never notice the second.

The same policy page carries three more requirements that catch people out:

• "Digital downloads do not qualify as physical items for charitable donations on Etsy." If you sell fundraiser printables or SVGs, the charity framing is not available to you at all.
• Listings "cannot be created solely for the purpose of transferring money," and crowdfunding — including tip or gratuity listings — is prohibited.
• "Etsy cannot verify donations… Transactions for charity are entered into at the buyer's risk." Etsy is not policing whether the money arrives, which also means it is not vouching for you if a buyer complains.

The other layer nobody sees: "a portion of proceeds" is a regulated sentence

This one has nothing to do with intellectual property and it surprises everybody. When a seller advertises that buying a product benefits a charity, that is a charitable sales promotion, and the seller is a commercial co-venturer under state charitable solicitation law.

Several states — Alabama, California, Massachusetts and South Carolina among those most often named — require a commercial co-venturer to register, file the contract with the charity, or file a campaign report. Disclosure rules commonly require the advertisement to state the specific dollar amount or percentage per item going to the charity. Vague phrasing like "a portion of proceeds will go to ABC Charity" is exactly what those rules were written to prohibit.

Requirements vary by state and by dollar threshold, and this is general information rather than legal advice for your situation — but if your listing says "a portion of proceeds," it is worth twenty minutes of reading. Changing it to "$5.00 from every shirt goes to [charity]" is both better compliance and better copy.

Where these listings actually get caught

Almost always in the parts of the listing sellers treat as an afterthought. A shop that has learned to keep "Disney" out of the title will still put disney inspired, mickey ears, castle svg and minnie birthday in the tags, and will describe the design in full in the description because that's where buyers ask questions. A clean title over dirty tags is not protection — it's the pattern rights holders point to as evidence that you knew.

Check titles, tags and descriptions together. That's the whole listing, and it's what a rights holder's monitoring service reads.

What to do instead

• Sell the labour, not the branded goods. Offer a customisation service where the customer supplies the blank garment. Nothing branded ever enters commerce through your shop.
• Make the design original. A pink-ribbon design with the child's name and a hand-drawn motif raises no brand issue at all, and for a school or family fundraiser it usually outperforms borrowed IP.
• Ask. Brands do license for charity, and some run structured programmes. A written yes costs one email and settles the question permanently.
• Get the charity's consent in writing before you name them — Etsy's policy requires it, and most charities have a form.
• Name the exact amount per item, not "a portion."
• Physical items only if you're using the charity framing on Etsy.

The honest counterweight

The realistic downside here is not a lawsuit. Disney is not suing a room parent over forty shirts, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling fear. The realistic downside is a takedown, a policy strike on your shop, and the specific misery of telling forty families that their fundraiser order is cancelled two weeks before the event — with the money already collected.

It's also true that fundraiser listings using brand IP survive on Etsy constantly, sometimes for years. That's worth understanding correctly rather than dismissing: platform silence means nobody filed a report, not that anyone approved. We covered why that's a weaker shield than it looks in the piece on selling Elf on the Shelf accessories and the "I've sold them for years" defence, and the same dynamic runs through school spirit wear with mascots and team names and custom Disney trip shirts.

The cause is real. The generosity is real. Neither of them is a licence, and the company you're borrowing from has already published a document saying so.

For the specific marks, product categories and phrasings Disney enforces most, see our Disney trademark guide — and if your fundraiser is tied to an event, the Olympic and Team USA guide covers a rights holder with statutory protections most sellers don't know exist.