65 years after the famous novelist’s death, George Orwell’s estate is ironically handing out copyright notices to people using Orwell quotes on merchandise… or more specifically… the number 1984. According to TorrentFreak, one man trying to sell t-shirts with the phrase “1984 is already here” has been contacted by the estate claiming that he had infringed copyright.

Josh Hadley had been attempting to sell the Nineteen Eighty-Four referencing t-shirts through CafePress when the estate picked up on the infringements. According to the complaint, the t-shirt design uses George Orwell quotes – but the only reference to the author are the numbers that make up the book’s title.

“First off is the irony of the estate of George Orwell being all Orwellian but second is that you can’t copyright a number,” Hadley tells TorrentFreak. “The US Copyright Office has long since established this, and second they are claiming I am using ‘quotes’ from the book. Look at the image in question and tell me what ‘quotes’ I used.”

Bill Hamilton, the Orwell estate’s literary executor, told TorrentFreak that “the estate has never licensed merchandising, nor have the licensees of the relevant film rights, under which merchandising usually comes. Some of the merchandising I asked to be taken down was in clear breach of copyright.”

However, according to US Copyright Office regulations, “individual numbers, letters, sounds, and short phrases consisting of such elements are not copyrightable, because they do not contain sufficient creative authorship.”

Hadley plans to continue selling the t-shirt through his own store.

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