Online fan merchandising store Bluegape.com has shut down operations due to copyright issues and plans to pivot to a new business model, reports Techcircle. Bluegape allowed designers and brands to set up merchandise stores and sell through e-commerce platforms like Flipkart, Snapdeal and Amazon. Following complaints of copyright infringement brought to the notice of Flipkart and Amazon these platforms have stopped retailing products from Bluegape powered merchandise stores. This has made it unviable for Bluegape to continue operations as apparently over 70% of its revenues were generated by the fan art merchandising business. All Bluegape products on Flipkart are currently marked 'Out of Stock', but on Amazon India some Bluegape products are still available for sale. ARPS complaint: Last month, Artists Right Protection Society (ARPS), which helps visual artists in protecting their Intellectual Property Rights, had asked Flipkart to bar 15 sellers from its platform as the merchandise they were selling infringed IP rights of some visual artists. These sellers include Aristo, Thirumala Pitshop, 24X7shop, Eclipse, Posterboy, AffordableArtIndia, Pi-Store-NIFC, Printland, Design Studio, Uniquegadget, Gamyam, Koko Retail, Active Elements and Pickpattern. However, products from a number of these sellers like Posterboy & Printland are still available on Flipkart. Surprisingly, Bluegape.com's name doesn't feature on either this list of 15 sellers or the petition on Change.org by ARPS. In an email sent out to fanstore owners (a screenshot of which can be seen here), Bluegape informed them that the company had discussed the issue with Flipkart & Amazon over the last month but…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...