MOVIE PRODUCERS GO AFTER T-SHIRTS SUPPLIER

Summit Entertainment, L.L.C., owners of popular vampires’ series “Twilight” has filed a lawsuit in a California district court against popular print-on-demand company Zazzle.com, Inc. for trademark and copyright infringement, among other charges, over their selling of protected names, phrases, and images.

Zazzle allows its users to upload images that are placed on blank T-shirts, posters, mugs, and other assorted merchandise, which are in turn entered into Zazzle’s marketplace for its order-taking and processing, printing and shipping to third-party customers buying from its website. Its users are required to agree to its Terms of Service, wherein the user agrees to being Intellectual Property owner of the image being uploaded.

The complaint alleges Zazzle’s users are stealing “tens of thousands” of its trademarked “Twilight” images, putting them on merchandise, and thus interfering with Summit’s exclusive licensing arrangements. Zazzle’s chief competitor is a San Mateo, California, company called CafePress, who has entered such a licensing arrangement, and who recently experienced a mass migration of its shopkeepers (designers) to Zazzle, following CafePress having forcibly taken the lion’s share of said designers income by fixing the retail prices of its marketplace products and tossing a measly 10% back to the designers. Previously the designers had been able to set their own markups. [Read full story on CafePress at ArtistsForFairPlay.org.]

Digital Cheeseburger suggests, merely for the sake of sound business practice and fair play, that Summit Entertainment might best attempt to staunch the leak in its merchandise revenue by going after CafePress for their outlandish decision to alter its Terms of Service on its designers (who amassed a large collection of legal “Twilight” designs before leaving CafePress for a fairer marketplace) rather than chasing down a company (Zazzle) that was third-party haven to disillusioned designers. After all, regardless the outcome of the lawsuit, said designers will not return to CafePress to purvey their designs, and Summit Entertainment will still stand to lose potential present and future spin-off merchandising revenues.

At this time, it is unclear whether Zazzle will move to throw the designers under the bus, by attempting to reroute the alleged trademark and copyright violations from itself as a ‘fulfillment service’ to the designers as fraudulent ‘creators’ of offending designs.

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