Image Rights, Credit and Licensing

Most images here are owned by someone else

Garbage Pail Kids card art, wrappers, packaging, film and animation frames, comic covers and product photography are the property of their respective rights holders. That usually means The Topps Company, which created and owns the brand, the studio behind a film or cartoon, a comics publisher, a toy maker, a retailer, or the individual painter. Card scans often come from fan archives such as GEEPEEKAY, and we credit the archive as well as the owner. garbagepail.kids is an independent fan site and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or licensed by The Topps Company or Fanatics. All trademarks belong to their owners.

We reproduce that material for editorial, historical and archival purposes: to report news, to document the cards' release history, and to identify and catalogue individual pieces. Every image is credited to the source we obtained it from wherever that source is known, and image credits appear alongside the image, in its caption, or in the credit line of the gallery it sits in.

garbagepail.kids grants no licence to reuse third-party material. If you want to use an image that belongs to a rights holder, you need permission from that rights holder, not from us. We are happy to tell you what we know about a piece's provenance so you can approach the right party.

What garbagepail.kids does own

Our own contribution is the site itself: the written text, research, catalogue data, captions, card and set summaries, page design, logos and layout, plus any original photography we shoot. Those are copyright garbagepail.kids, all rights reserved, and are not offered under a free licence. Short quotations with a link back are welcome under normal editorial practice. Bulk copying of our catalogue text or data is not.

Hosting and hotlinking

Images shown on garbagepail.kids are served from our own storage rather than hotlinked from the site we found them on, so that we are not consuming another site's bandwidth. That is a courtesy, not a claim of ownership. A file served from a garbagepail.kids address is still owned by its rights holder.

AI-generated and AI-assisted imagery

Any image on this site that was generated or materially altered by AI is labelled as such where it appears. Our editorial process, including how AI is used and where human oversight sits, is set out on the news desk page.

Licensing enquiries, credit corrections and takedown requests

If you are a rights holder or an artist and you want an image credited differently, credited to you by name, or removed, tell us and we will act on it. We do not require a formal notice and we do not argue the point: a request from the owner is enough. Send it through the site contact page with the page address and enough detail to identify the image, and we will confirm when it is done.

The same address handles licensing enquiries for our own original material, and requests for what we know about a piece's provenance.