A federal judge in Ohio has ruled that Amazon must stand trial as a possible direct infringer of an apparel designer’s copyrights because of how its Merch on Demand service works — and that its handling of the designer’s takedown notices is bad enough to deny it the DMCA safe harbour at summary judgment. The 14 October 2026 opinion and order in Weekend Warrior Clothing, LLC v. Amazon.com Services, LLC, No. 1:23-cv-752 (S.D. Ohio, Western Division), was issued by Judge Douglas R. Cole. On the cross-motions, Amazon was denied summary judgment on direct and vicarious infringement, granted it on contributory infringement, and denied it on four of the five other issues it raised; the plaintiff’s own motion was denied in full, and claims over two designs (“Ameri-CAN v2” and “Down Goes Liver”) were dismissed without prejudice because no infringing listings had been identified. The decision was first reported by IPWatchdog.
The underlying facts are ordinary print-on-demand facts, which is why the ruling travels. Third parties uploaded designs that Weekend Warrior says copy its registered artwork; the opinion records roughly 560 accused listings and more than 20,000 discrete orders between March 2020 and at least 24 February 2025, with 107 of the listings producing no sales at all. Weekend Warrior sued the platform rather than the uploaders. Judge Cole adopted the volitional-conduct requirement that separates direct infringement from secondary liability, then held that Amazon may clear it: it screens who may post, reviews each design before it appears, sets the price, names itself the seller of record, manufactures the garment, ships it, takes the payment and handles returns. That, the court reasoned, is not a bulletin board — it is closer to a copy shop that keeps customers’ files, puts prints in its own window at its own price, and pays the uploader a royalty when a passer-by buys one. The contributory claim died on the Supreme Court’s decision this term in Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment, 146 S. Ct. 959 (2026), which the court read to require that a provider intend its service be used for infringement — by inducement or by tailoring — and which says expressly that liability cannot rest on knowledge plus inadequate response. The vicarious claim survived on the opposite logic: Amazon can review, delist and terminate, and it earns on every sale.
What it changes
Against a print-on-demand platform, the live theories are now direct and vicarious — not contributory. Cox has quietly reorganised platform-liability pleading, and this is one of the first opinions to apply it to a marketplace rather than an ISP. “We told them repeatedly and they did nothing” is no longer a contributory claim; without inducement or a service tailored to infringement, that count is gone as a matter of law. The same facts, however, feed vicarious liability (right to supervise plus a direct financial interest in the specific infringement) and — where the platform fulfils the order itself — direct liability. If you are drafting a complaint, plead the fulfilment chain with specificity: who sets the price, who is named as seller, who manufactures, who takes the money, who handles returns. Note also the split the court drew from Atari Interactive, Inc. v. Redbubble, Inc., 515 F. Supp. 3d 1089 (N.D. Cal. 2021): automated generation of a mock-up image may well be non-volitional display, while the sale and manufacture of the physical product is where volition lives. Your damages case should be built around shipped orders, not listing counts.
How you send takedown notices is now part of your evidence file. The reason Amazon could not win its section 512(c) defence is the repeat-infringer prong, 17 U.S.C. § 512(i)(1)(A): on this record a jury could find that the notices were allowed, in the words of Ellison v. Robertson, to “fall into a vacuum and go unheeded”. The court described the response to the notices as dismal and said the platform “sticks its head in the sand”. The mechanism matters to every rights holder: an automated process flagged the owner’s reports as fraudulent and blocklisted his email address, so later messages were rejected or routed to the trash, and — per the opinion — a submitter branded fraudulent has no appeal, where a submitter deemed merely abusive is told and can appeal. The address came off the blocklist two weeks after suit was filed, then went back on it from 28 June to 15 November 2024. Practical consequences: send notices from an address demonstrably tied to the registered owner, keep every submission and every response, treat silence or bounce-backs as evidence to preserve rather than noise, and re-send through a second channel so the record shows the platform had the notice. A notice programme that is merely diligent is also, after this ruling, the thing that strips a platform of its safe harbour.
Registration timing silently capped this plaintiff’s recovery. Weekend Warrior conceded it cannot obtain statutory damages for 22 of the asserted copyrights because they were not registered within three months of publication; the court left the attorneys’ fees question for post-trial motions. For design-led businesses that publish continuously — apparel, graphics, packaging — this is the cheapest lesson in the opinion. Register in batches on a standing schedule so that the registration lands inside the three-month window after first publication, and keep the publication dates themselves in a docket. The difference is between electing statutory damages per work and having to prove actual damages against a platform whose sales records you must first obtain in discovery.
Your own design inputs are now a validity exposure. The plaintiff lost its own summary judgment motion because Amazon raised a genuine dispute over whether the registered designs are valid at all: it identified specific preexisting material — beer-brand and film references among them — behind 21 of the designs, which could make them unauthorised derivative works, and the designer had conceded using preexisting images as a starting point. The court also refused to do the plaintiff’s infringement analysis for it: a side-by-side chart covering all 560 listings was not enough, because substantial similarity has to be shown against protectable elements design by design, with only pixel-identical copies escaping that filtration. If you enforce a graphics portfolio, audit the provenance of each asset before you assert it, and expect to brief similarity one work at a time.
And if your portfolio is copyright-only, you have no enhanced platform remedy. One footnote in the opinion deserves more attention than the holding in some portfolios: Amazon’s free Brand Registry — the enhanced monitoring and reporting suite — is available only to owners of registered trademarks and, on the record here, does not cover copyright claims. Weekend Warrior owned registered copyrights and no registered marks, so the tooling was simply unavailable to it, leaving the ordinary notice form that the court found wanting. Brand owners who have deferred registering the names, logos and slogans that sit alongside their artwork should price that decision as an enforcement-access decision, not just a legal-rights one: a trademark filing is the gate to the platform tooling, and a clearance trademark search is what tells you whether that filing will survive.
One timing caution for anyone modelling a platform suit. This case was filed in 2023 and reached summary judgment in October 2026, with a jury still to decide whether the asserted copyrights are valid and whether Amazon’s involvement crosses the volitional line. Nothing here is a final ruling that a print-on-demand operator is a direct infringer — it is a ruling that the question goes to a jury, which is itself the change: the theory can no longer be dismissed early, and that shifts settlement leverage in every notice-and-takedown dispute of this shape.