Can You Sell Attack on Titan Merch on Etsy? The 'There's No © or ® On It' Myth

You found the Survey Corps emblem — the Wings of Freedom — as a clean transparent PNG. You looked at it carefully before you used it. No little © in the corner. No ® next to anything. You searched the USPTO database for "Attack on Titan" and what came back was a registration for video game software, which has nothing to do with the enamel pin you're making.

So you listed it. And your reasoning was better than most sellers': you actually checked.

That's the problem. You ran a real check, on the wrong thing.

The part where you're right — and you're right about more than you think

Start with trademark, because there is a genuine statute here that almost no seller has ever heard of, and it says roughly what you think it says.

15 U.S.C. § 1111 — Section 29 of the Lanham Act — is titled "Notice of registration; display with mark; recovery of profits and damages in infringement suit." It provides that a registrant may give notice by displaying "Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office," "Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off.," or the letter R in a circle. And then it does something real:

In a suit by a registrant who failed to give that notice, "no profits and no damages shall be recovered under the provisions of this chapter unless the defendant had actual notice of the registration."

That is not a technicality. A registrant who never used ® walks into court with their money claims capped at zero unless they can prove you actually knew. If you have been told "the ® symbol doesn't mean anything legally," you have been told something false — it means quite a lot about what a rights holder can collect.

You are also right that ® is not optional in the other direction. It is unlawful to use ® on a mark that is not federally registered. So its absence is genuinely ambiguous in a way sellers rarely appreciate.

And your USPTO search was accurate. ATTACK ON TITAN, Reg. No. 4,783,526 (Serial 86420003), owned by Kodansha Ltd., filed 9 October 2014, registered 28 July 2015, is a standard character mark in International Class 009 — "computer game cartridges and discs; computer game software; electronic game software for handheld electronic devices; interactive game software; downloadable computer game programs." Its sibling, Reg. No. 4,669,798 (Serial 86120811), covers television and motion picture production services. Neither one is a t-shirt.

Finally, the copyright half of your check was also, on its face, reasonable. You looked for a © notice on the artwork and there wasn't one.

Four accurate observations. Now here is where each one turns.

Copyright stopped running on symbols on 1 March 1989

The Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988 took effect on 1 March 1989. From that date forward, a copyright notice on a published work became optional in the United States. The statute is unusually blunt about it: 17 U.S.C. § 401(a) says a notice "may be placed on publicly distributed copies." May. Not shall.

Before 1978, omitting notice could genuinely forfeit a copyright — that is where this myth comes from, and it was true once. It has not been true for thirty-seven years. The manga began serialisation in 2009. There has never been a moment in the life of Attack on Titan when a missing © meant anything at all.

There is a second layer specific to a Japanese work, and it is the one that catches even careful sellers.

You may have gone looking for a US copyright registration and not found one. Under 17 U.S.C. § 411(a), registration is normally a precondition to filing an infringement suit — and the Supreme Court held in Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com, 586 U.S. 296 (2019), that this means the Copyright Office must actually have acted on the application, not merely received it. That sounds like a real obstacle for a rights holder.

Read the sentence again. Section 411(a) imposes that requirement on "United States work[s]" only. A Japanese manga is not a United States work under the § 101 definition. Kodansha does not need a US registration certificate to sue you, and never did. Under Berne national treatment, implemented at 17 U.S.C. § 104, a Japanese work receives US copyright protection automatically, from the moment of creation, with no filing and no symbol.

So on the copyright side, every single thing you looked for was something the law abolished, exempted, or never required.

The trademark statute you found limits money — not takedowns

Section 1111 is real, and it is also narrower than it looks.

It restricts profits and damages. It says nothing about injunctions — a court can order you to stop regardless of whether the owner ever used ®. And it says nothing whatsoever about Etsy, because an Etsy IP takedown is not a lawsuit. No judge is involved, no damages are calculated, and § 1111 has no application to a form submitted through Etsy's reporting portal. Your listing comes down, you take an IP strike, and the statute you were relying on was never in the room.

The "actual notice" clause matters too, in a way that runs against you rather than for you. The moment a cease-and-desist letter or an Etsy notice reaches you, you have actual notice, and the cap lifts from that day forward. Every officially licensed Attack on Titan shirt on the market — Hot Topic, Uniqlo, Ripple Junction, Atsuko — carries notice on the neck label and hangtag. Kodansha runs a public licensing programme for the title. The argument that a seller in this category had no idea anyone owned it does not survive contact with the category.

And the class limitation cuts less than you'd hope. A registration's class defines the registration's scope, not the boundary of the owner's rights — unregistered rights exist under § 43(a), 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a), and confusion analysis reaches related goods. We have written separately about how trademark classes actually work and how to read what a registration really covers, because "different class" is its own popular and unreliable defence.

But the trademark question is mostly beside the point here, and that is the thing to internalise: the Wings of Freedom emblem is artwork. Artwork is a copyright problem first. You spent your entire check in the wrong body of law.

The kill shot: the notice exists, and you had access to it

Here is the part that turns a bad listing into an expensive one.

The copyright notice for this franchise is not missing. It reads, in the standard form Kodansha uses across licensing and broadcast materials:

© Hajime Isayama, KODANSHA / "ATTACK ON TITAN" The Final Season Production Committee

It is in the credits of every episode. It is in the front matter of every volume. It is on the official licensing pages. What you inspected was a fan-uploaded PNG on a sticker aggregator — an image stripped of the context that carried the notice. The emblem didn't lose its notice. Somebody deleted it, and you inherited the deletion.

Now open 17 U.S.C. § 401(d). If a proper notice appears on the published copies "to which a defendant in a copyright infringement suit had access," then no weight shall be given to a defence based on innocent infringement in mitigation of damages.

Read that against your own shop. You sell Attack on Titan merchandise. You have watched the series or read the manga — that is why you are in this niche. You had access to copies bearing the notice. Section 401(d) is not a general rule; it is a rule aimed with some precision at exactly your situation.

And innocent infringement was only ever a discount anyway. § 504(c)(2) lets a court reduce statutory damages to not less than $200 per work where the infringer proves they were unaware and had no reason to believe. That is a floor, not an exit, the burden is on you, and § 401(d) removes it entirely. Compare it to the ordinary statutory range of up to $30,000 per work, or up to $150,000 for willful infringement, and the shape of the risk becomes clear: the symbol you were looking for wasn't a permission slip. It was, at most, a small discount you have already forfeited.

What Kodansha actually does about it

Two anchors, both recent, and both involving people who were not selling anything.

In January 2025, the fan studio Studio Eclypse released Attack on Titan: Requiem, a roughly fifteen-minute animated alternate ending. It was free. The studio publicly confirmed it never took donations for the project and had never positioned it as a replacement for the canon ending. When Kodansha approached X to have the videos removed, X declined, taking the position that there was no copyright infringement. That is a platform making a judgment call in the fan project's favour.

Kodansha then filed DMCA subpoenas so it could serve the studio directly. The videos came down in September 2025. If you take one thing from this post, take that sequence: a platform's assessment that your work is fine is worth exactly nothing against a rights holder who is willing to take one more procedural step. Etsy's silence about your listing is the same species of nothing.

Second: on 24 June 2025, an arbitration court in Russia largely ruled for Kodansha against IQ Art Management LLC over a commercial exhibition in St. Petersburg that used 18 Kodansha works, including Attack on Titan, without permission. Infringement was found as to 15 of them, with damages of roughly ¥6.9 million. Kodansha stated it will continue to "respond strictly to copyright infringements, both domestically and internationally." A publisher that will litigate an unlicensed exhibition in a foreign court is not going to be troubled by a Shopify-scale Etsy shop.

Where sellers in this niche actually get caught

Titles are the least of it. On a franchise like this the exposure sits in the fields you filled in quickly:

• Tags. "aot," "snk," "shingeki," "survey corps," "wings of freedom," "scout regiment," "titan shifter." Every one of those is a franchise identifier, and tags are indexed, searchable and quoted verbatim in takedown complaints.
• The description. "Perfect for Attack on Titan fans" places the mark squarely in commercial use even if your title says "anime scout wings pin." Rights holders plead a clean title over a franchise-loaded description as evidence of intent, not as a mitigating factor.
• Quoted dialogue. "On that day, humanity received a grave reminder" is protected expression from the work, not a folk saying.
• The mockup image itself. A product photo generated from official art carries the underlying copyright with it.

If you only ever check your titles, you are checking the field that gets you caught last. This is exactly why our scanner reads titles, tags and descriptions together — and it is why sellers who "checked and it was fine" are so often the ones who get the notice. Our Attack on Titan trademark guide sets out the specific elements Kodansha enforces.

A correction to our own guide

Two things in our own brands.json entry for this franchise needed fixing, and we fixed them in the same commit as this post.

First, the entry listed "Survey Corps wings design" as a common violation while offering "freedom wings design" as a safe alternative. Those are the same emblem with the words reordered. Softening the name of a protected device is not avoiding the device — it is the workaround that gets pleaded back at you. We have replaced it with descriptors that don't route through the protected element at all.

Second, our note read "The Survey Corps Wings of Freedom emblem is a registered trademark." We went looking for the US device registration to cite it and could not verify one. That does not make the emblem safe — it makes the emblem a copyright asset rather than a registered trademark, which, as everything above should make clear, is a worse position for you and not a better one. A registered mark is at least searchable. An unregistered original artwork protected under Berne is enforceable against you with nothing on file anywhere.

We would rather correct our own page than let a seller build a listing on it. If you want the general version of that lesson, see why a "dead" or unregistered trademark is not a safe one.

What is actually safe

Original work that does not route through the franchise. A generic militaristic wing motif you drew yourself, in your own composition, with no relationship to the two-tone crossed-wing arrangement. Original illustration in an anime-influenced style — style is not owned, and we have covered that boundary elsewhere. Blank cosplay components. Craft supplies. Your own characters.

What is not safe: the emblem in any recognisable form, character art of Eren, Mikasa or Levi, the wordmark in Latin or Japanese script, quoted dialogue, and the whole cluster of franchise tags above. "I redrew it myself" changes who made the copy, not whether a copy was made — the same reasoning we walked through in the AI-generated Superman post, and the same conclusion. For the broader anime picture, our Naruto merchandise guide covers how Japanese publishers structure enforcement, and our fan art guide covers the derivative-works question directly.

The honest counterweight

None of this means every unlicensed anime listing gets removed. Enforcement in this category is real but uneven, and there are shops that have sold Survey Corps pins for years without hearing a word. Kodansha's visible actions have concentrated on high-profile targets — a fifteen-minute animated film with a large audience, a ticketed exhibition — not on individual pin sellers.

It is also true that Japanese publishers have historically tolerated a great deal of derivative fan production, and that the tolerance is culturally genuine rather than a legal accident.

But tolerance is not a licence, silence is not permission, and neither one is what you were relying on. You were relying on a symbol. The symbol was never the check. It was removed from the file you downloaded, it stopped being required in 1989, and the one place it still carries legal weight — § 1111 — governs money in a lawsuit nobody has filed, not the takedown that actually ends your shop.

The check that would have helped takes about four seconds and does not involve squinting at a corner of a PNG.