Strange rejection from Shutterstock for Trademark

I had three of my images rejected by Shutterstock today for:

Trademark–Image / Metadata potentially infringes on intellectual property rights.

Here is one of them:

Rejected image

Rejected image

You can see the keywords in the link behind the image as well. I can’t see any trademark issues here – I even removed the small “windows” key from the laptop and the phones are tablets are very generic. Perhaps I need to remove the power buttons next! If anyone can see an issue, please let me know!

Update: As there were three images I tried different things on each of them. On one I removed the power buttons from the phone. On each of them, I removed some tiny markings on the white tablet that were the “go back” and “menu” items. Perhaps the design of those was problematic. I then resubmitted. This time all of them were accepted – which now gives me a further question – would they have been accepted because someone else looked at them, or did my removal of those tiny icons make the difference. I guess we will never know!

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6 Responses

  1. Iryna says:

    May be they have a bunch of new, unexperienced reviewers. Today they rejected one of my images for “irrelevant keywords” while all of them looked like relevant to me. They are quite a pain in the ass with their rejections.

  2. Steve Boyko says:

    I wonder if the shape or design of one or more devices are trademarked.

    I agree that sometimes the copyright/trademark rejections are baffling. I’ve spent some time removing all traces from a train, for example, and it still gets rejected. No idea why.

  3. Alessandra says:

    The computer looks like my mac book air and mac is copyrighted. Is is a mac book air?

  4. admin says:

    No, not a Mac at all – it is a Samsung windows PC

  5. Alessandra says:

    Then I was wrong. 😉

I'm always interested in what you think - please let me know!