Can You Sell Squid Game Merchandise on Etsy? Trademark and Copyright Rules (2026)

Squid Game is the biggest show Netflix has ever made. Season 3 closed out the Korean series in June 2025 with a record-breaking finale, and the franchise isn't slowing down: David Fincher's spin-off, Squid Game: America, started shooting in February 2026 with Utopia creator Dennis Kelly writing. Every new wave of attention sends buyers to Etsy searching for guard masks, pink jumpsuits, dalgona cookie cutters, and Young-hee doll prints.

Here's what makes Squid Game different from almost every other franchise we've covered: the games in the show are real Korean children's games that predate Netflix by decades. Dalgona candy is genuine Korean street food. Red light, green light — mugunghwa kkochi pieotseumnida — is a real playground game. So is the actual squid game (ojingeo geim) the show is named after. None of that belongs to Netflix.

And yet sellers get listings pulled and shops suspended over Squid Game merch constantly. The reason is the same trap we've written about with public domain characters: the underlying material may be free, but the version everyone recognizes is owned. This guide draws that line precisely.

Who Owns What in Squid Game

The rights holder is Netflix Studios, LLC, and unlike some franchises with tangled licensing chains, this one is clean: Netflix commissioned the show, owns it outright, and runs its own merchandise program through Netflix.shop and licensing deals (Razer's official guard-mask gaming gear collab is a good example of what licensed product looks like).

On the trademark side, Netflix moved fast and globally. Within weeks of the 2021 premiere it filed SQUID GAME applications in more than two dozen jurisdictions — the US, EU, Canada, Korea, and beyond. In the USPTO database you'll find Netflix Studios filings such as serial numbers 97072817 and 97077792, covering far more than entertainment services: class 25 (clothing), class 28 (toys and games), class 16 (stationery), class 18 (bags), and — pointedly — class 21, which covers bakeware and kitchenware. That last one exists almost entirely because of dalgona cookie cutters. The World Intellectual Property Organization itself published a piece on the filing wave, noting that Etsy and Amazon were "already full of cookie cutters, green tracksuits and eerie full-face masks."

On the copyright side, Netflix owns the show's creative expression:

• The guard masks — the black fencing-style hood with a white circle, triangle, or square
• The Young-hee doll — the giant animatronic girl's specific design
• The logo — including the stylized lettering that swaps shapes into the title
• The green tracksuits with the number 456 (and the contestants' numbering system as presented), the pink guard jumpsuits, the set designs, the Front Man's mask

Use any of that on a product and you're squarely in infringement territory, handmade or not.

The Public Domain Trap: What Netflix Does NOT Own

This is the part most sellers get wrong in both directions — some sell obvious infringement thinking it's safe, others abandon perfectly legal products out of fear.

Netflix does not own:

• Dalgona / ppopgi candy. It's a Korean street sweet from the 1960s. Selling dalgona kits, sugar-candy molds, or honeycomb candy is legal.
• The playground games themselves. Red light green light, tug of war, marbles, hopscotch-style squid game — game rules and concepts aren't copyrightable at all.
• Korean culture. Hangul lettering, Korean snacks, K-drama-themed gifts generally.
• Plain geometric shapes. A circle, triangle, and square in a row is not automatically infringement — geometry is free.

But here's the trap: context converts the free stuff into infringement. A dalgona kit sold as "Korean honeycomb street candy kit" is fine. The same kit titled "Squid Game challenge kit" with an umbrella-shape cutter, a guard-mask graphic, and the show's font is infringing on multiple grounds at once — the trademark in the name (in class 21, the exact class Netflix registered for this), the copyrighted mask design, and trade dress. The circle-triangle-square combo is the same: printed in white on a black fencing hood, or paired with "let the games begin" and a pink jumpsuit figure, a court will have no trouble finding you traded on the show.

If you sell the Korean game, you're safe. If you sell the show's version of the Korean game, you're not. The same split applies to Wizard-of-Oz sellers (book is public domain, the 1939 ruby slippers are not) and Moana sellers (Māui mythology is free, Disney's fishhook design is not).

"Netflix Hasn't Sued Etsy Sellers" Is False Comfort

We have not found a documented Netflix Schedule A lawsuit over Squid Game merchandise, and we won't pretend one exists. But before you treat that as a green light, look at what Netflix has actually done:

• Built the portfolio for exactly this purpose. Trademark filings in 25+ jurisdictions across merchandising classes have one function: turning unofficial sellers into infringers Netflix can act against at will.
• Run the takedown machine. Squid Game listings get removed from Etsy continuously through ordinary IP reports — no lawsuit needed, and each report is a strike against your shop.
• Enforced before. Netflix sent a cease-and-desist over the unauthorized Stranger Things "Upside Down" bar — polite, but a clear marker that it watches commercial use of its shows. We covered that in our Stranger Things guide.
• Watched the counterfeit flood get worse. After Season 2, Korean media and IP watchers documented a surge of unlicensed Squid Game goods on Temu and AliExpress, drawing public criticism Netflix is under pressure to answer. CBP counterfeit seizures hit record levels in FY2024 and kept climbing — character merchandise is a standing target.

The legal exposure if Netflix does escalate: statutory damages up to $2 million per counterfeited mark and up to $150,000 per work for willful copyright infringement — the same framework behind every Schedule A frozen-funds case we've covered.

The Myths That Get Squid Game Sellers Suspended

"It's handmade, so it's different." Etsy's handmade policy is not an IP defense. A hand-sewn pink guard jumpsuit infringes exactly like a factory one.

"It's fan art." Fan art is a derivative work. The moment you sell it, you need a license you don't have.

"I wrote 'inspired by' and added a disclaimer." "Not affiliated with Netflix" protects nothing — it's practically an admission you knew whose IP you were using.

"It's just a digital file." SVGs, printables, and cut files of the masks, doll, or logo infringe the same as physical goods.

"They're just shapes." See above — the combination, styling, and context are what Netflix's lawyers will put in front of a judge, and your own listing tags ("squid game," "456," "front man") do their evidence-gathering for them.

What You CAN Sell

There's a real, legal market adjacent to this franchise:

• Authentic dalgona/ppopgi kits — market them as Korean street candy, nostalgia, or K-snack gifts. No show name, no masks, no umbrella-cutter-plus-guard-graphic bundles.
• Korean culture and K-drama-night gifts — Hangul art, Korean snack boxes, "K-drama marathon" themed items with your own original designs.
• Retro playground-games products — red light green light, marbles, tug of war as games, in your own visual style, with zero show references.
• Your own original "survival game" art — original masked characters and dystopian-competition concepts of your own design, not redraws of Netflix's costumes.
• Personalized blanks — custom names and text on products with no franchise elements.

The rule that runs through all of it: sell the culture and the vibe, never the show's expression. And before listing, run a trademark search — Netflix's filings are easy to find, which means ignorance is hard to argue.

Already Selling Squid Game Items? Clean Up Now

1. Search your shop for "squid game," "456," "front man," "young-hee," "red light green light doll," and guard-mask imagery — titles, tags, descriptions, and photos.
2. Deactivate clear infringement — masks, logo items, tracksuit replicas, doll prints, show-branded cookie cutter sets.
3. Re-position the legal products — dalgona kits and Korean-game items survive fine under culture-first keywords; our SEO-without-brand-names guide shows how.
4. If you've already received a complaint, deal with it properly — here's how to respond to a trademark violation notice and what to do if your shop gets suspended.

With Squid Game: America in production, Netflix's incentive to police this franchise is about to reset to maximum all over again. The sellers who get ahead of that now are the ones who'll still have shops when the spin-off drops.

Want to catch risky listings before Netflix's bots do? ShieldMyShop scans your Etsy shop for trademark and copyright red flags — including franchise names buried in your tags — and flags them before they become strikes.