People are trying to make money using the increasingly ubiquitous likeness of recent TikTok star Nathan Apodaca, a.k.a. Doggface208, and he's not having it.
Australia-based Culture Kings has been selling a t-shirt dubbed "Dreams Vintage" that features a clearly "Dreams"-referencing depiction of Apodaca's face for $36.95. Attorney Jeffrey R. Klein of Fisher & Wolfe LLP, per an exclusive TMZ rundown on Monday, has now sent out a takedown notice stating that Apodaca owns the rights to the photo. Klein further argues that Culture Kings has "no right" to make money using the image and is threatening a full-blown lawsuit if the shirt isn’t pulled from the shop.
At the time of this writing, the t-shirt did not appear to still be live on the Culture Kings site, though a screenshot can be seen below via TMZ:
Last week, it was reported that Doggface208's official self-designed merch line (available via UpMerch) had bagged more than $30,000 in profit in just over five days. The UpMerch site, meanwhile, reported a 96 percent leap in new customers after dropping the Doggface pieces. Originally, Apodaca had been attempting to handle all merch sales on his own, though that effort proved unsustainable once his Fleetwood Mac-soundtracked TikTok clip went astronomical.
Over the weekend, Apodaca helped usher in the holiday season with a family-assisted clip set to "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas."
