I wasn’t a supervisor, but usually worked by myself at nights and and weekends, so was left to make a lot of decisions by myself that no one probably knew about. The store managers had no clue about what we did in the print department and wouldn’t be able to do anything if someone complained.
I once had a argument with a manager on the the weekend, don’t remember about what and he threatened to send me home. I said fine, but the department would have to close unless he was willing to take home. He shut up and left me alone.
This is correct. Mattel didn’t go after Aqua for “Barbie Girl” because they legitimately believed the song infringed on the Barbie trademark, and they had to know there was a pretty good chance they would not prevail in the end. But they felt they had to complain simply to avoid any precedent being set that they were not aggressively defending the trademark everywhere possible.
Also, re the OP, in a personal example that may be comparable: My older daughter wanted a Marvel superhero birthday party. We called a number of local bakeries, and none of them would make cupcakes with character decorations, because they didn’t want to get dinged for infringement. We wound up buying a stock of blank edible paper and leveraging a personal connection who worked in a professional kitchen to use their special printer with edible ink, and we printed cupcake toppers ourselves.
To be clear, (almost) all recent art is copyrighted (aside: right, not write). Much of it is probably unregistered, but the copyright exists automatically as soon as the art is created. When your kid makes a crayon drawing in kindergarten, they have a copyright on it. What the printing services are concerned about is not whether it’s copyrighted, but whether the copyright is held by someone other than the customer. And probably also about whether the copyright owner is likely to take action over it.