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.

• MJ's Grave Not Fan-Friendly
• Angelina Jolie Fights Megan Fox For 'Barbarella'
• Obama 'Hope' Poster Artist's Attorneys: He Misled Us
• Rachel Zoe Wants To Dress Michelle Obama
• Ellen DeGeneres Show Flouts Music Copyright Laws
• Crypt Above Marilyn Monroe For Sale Again
• Dominick Dunne Dead
• Michael Jackson 'This Is It' Runs 3 More Weeks

• Internet Marketing Basics
• How are Roller Blading and Inline Skating Different?
• Improve Your Website Traffic With Search Engine Marketing
• LG GW620: The New Android Phone from LG
• The importance of good web design practices
• Starving for an Image - The Issue of Super Skinny Models
• Google 'may end China operations over Gmail breaches'
• How the Apple iPad Could Kill the Kindle

You might also like

2012 Not End Of World, Mayans Insist Get cool 2012 Mayan Calendar gear, t-shirts, buttons, gifts and much more! Click below: Even the Mayans...

Ellen DeGeneres Show Flouts Music Copyright Laws New judge on "American Idol", Ellen DeGeneres, is embroiled in a scandalous flouting of music copyright...

David Hasselhoff On Involuntary Psychiatric Hold TV actor David Hasselhoff, whom we reported earlier as suffering seizures following a days-long alcohol...

Bob Marley Heirs Try To Sink Pirates Jamaican reggae music icon, the late Bob Marley, is experiencing record sales of his music and merchandise...