Does Design Yangu Own My Designs? A Kenyan Designer's Guide to IP Rights on Print-on-Demand (2026)
Worried about who owns your artwork if you sell through Design Yangu? We break down copyright law, your IP rights, and exactly what you keep — everything — when you sell on Design Yangu Kenya.
There's a question that sits quietly in the back of every designer's mind before they upload their first piece to any platform. 'If I put my work on here — do they own it now?' It's a fair question. A smart question. And in Kenya's creative scene, where artists have watched international platforms use African artwork without credit, without payment — this question hits different. So let's answer it directly: your designs are yours. Full stop.
Under Kenya's Copyright Act (Cap 130), copyright protection attaches to your original work the moment you create it. You don't need to register it. You don't need to stamp it with a copyright symbol. The moment you draw that illustration, design that graphic, or create that pattern — it's yours. You own the right to reproduce it, sell products featuring it, license it to others, and stop others from using it without permission. Kenya is also a signatory to the Berne Convention, meaning your copyright is automatically recognised in 180+ countries.
When you upload a design to Design Yangu, you are granting a limited, non-exclusive licence. Non-exclusive means you can sell the same design on other platforms, in your own shop, as a poster, as a mug — however you like. Design Yangu doesn't get exclusivity. Limited means the licence is specifically for printing your design onto products and selling those products on the platform — we cannot use your design for our marketing campaigns or sell your design to third parties. Revocable means if you decide you're done with Design Yangu, you can take your designs down.
What Design Yangu cannot do with your work: sell your design to other brands or companies, use your designs in our own advertising without permission, prevent you from selling elsewhere, modify or alter your design without consent, or retain rights after you remove your designs. Once you take a design down, we stop selling products with it.
What you need to be careful about on your end: only upload work you actually own. Free fonts often have commercial licences — check before you upload. Stock images found on Google are almost never free for commercial use. AI-generated elements are a grey area globally and in Kenya — use with caution in commercial work.
Watermark your portfolio on social media, not your product files. When you upload to Design Yangu, your product files are stored securely and only accessed by the fulfilment system for printing — they're not publicly downloadable. Also document your design creation process: screenshot your working files with timestamps, save your layered files. A dated design file is strong evidence of authorship.
The Creative Economy in Kenya is having a moment. Too many Kenyan designers have had their work screenshotted and reprinted on cheap market products, used by brands on social media without credit or pay, or 'inspired by' in ways that earned the copier money and the creator nothing. Design Yangu is built on the opposite premise.
Design Yangu only succeeds if you succeed. Your IP protection isn't just written into our terms of service — it's baked into the business model. Every order puts money directly into the pocket of a Kenyan creative. Your design value should flow back to you.