Week 8 EOC : Bratz vs Mattel

Let’s imagine that we have walked into a car dealership.  This dealership is known for selling hummers and hummers only.  Your walking up and down the aisles and you notice a peculiar row of vehicles.  At a glance they look like your ordinary hummers, but upon taking a second look you notice that they are not what they seem.  In fact they are reimaginations of hummers created by a completely different company, but still seem identical in many forms.  Would this cause confusion, or would it just come down to being a fact that there will always be duplicate “Lookalikes” out there for products.  In the lawsuit against MGA Entertainment, Mattel Inc. tried to sue them for theft of trade secrets.  “MGA Entertainment Inc.’s $172.5 million victory over rival toymaker Mattel Inc. (MAT) for theft of trade secrets was thrown out by a federal appeals court that said the company’s counterclaims shouldn’t have been allowed to go to the jury.  At the same time, the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld the trial judge’s decision to award closely held MGA $137.2 million for having to defend against Mattel’s claims that MGA’s Bratz dolls infringed Mattel’s copyrights.” –www.bloomberg.com/news.  The ongoing trial had been a rivalry that had been going on for over eight years that claimed that the Bratz doll was identical of Mattel’s original gal-pal doll Barbie.  The trial was ultimately won by MGA that claimed that Mattel employees used fake business cards to get access to MGA’s booths at toy fairs and used this tactic to obtain trade secrets.  MGA was awarded $88.5 million in in damages.  So to say who is right and who is wrong is a subjective matter, that is tied to the conclusion that originality will always remain no matter who claims their product to be.