|
One
for the Little Guys
A big group of little guys won
a nice victory last week when Sweet Pea, Ltd., a Miami clothing
company, dropped a massive shakedown—er, lawsuit—against 52
small companies and individuals who had been using the term
“Sweet Pea” on clothing.
It looks like Sweet Pea, Ltd. decided there were easier ways
to make money than selling little black dresses. They hired
a lawyer and brought a vexatious trademark lawsuit! The suit
targeted small, mostly home-based businesses that sold clothing
with the words “sweet pea,” many of which were selling clothes
through CafePress, an Internet store that sells stuff for
anybody on a print-on-demand basis. Interestingly, they forgot
to sue any of the huge companies also out there busily selling
clothing using the words “sweet pea,” like Nordstrom’s or
Gymboree.
Each little company got served with a two-inch stack of legal
papers containing a demand for $16,000,000. The lawsuit was
venued in Miami, thousands of miles away from many of those
who were sued. Those who contacted the company’s attorneys
were reportedly told that they could get out of the suit for
$5,000.
It appears that Sweet Pea Ltd. was taking a page from the
music industry, which has been filing similar actions against
college students for downloading music. The choice is paying
an attorney thousands to fight the damn thing, or just pay
up and make it all go away.
All the little sweet peas did something else, something radical:
They banded together, got an attorney, and started yelling.
The press started picking up a bona fide David and Goliath
story. Soon the story hit the papers in Miami, and Sweet Pea,
Ltd. withdrew its silly lawsuit. A few of the defendants that
had paid a settlement to the company got their money back.
This was a classic case of trademark abuse—it happens all
the time, and the good guys don’t always win. An enabling
factor of trademark abuse is the incredibly elusive nature
of trademark rights. A trademark, as you might know, is a
designation of commercial source; a commercial name, logo,
sound, almost anything that identifies a business to the public.
Not all trademarks are created equal, some are easier than
others to protect. Totally random marks are strong—it’s not
for nothing that the drug companies come up with invented
words to brand their new medicines; more common terms, like
“Acme Explosives” or “Sweet Pea Clothing” get less protection.
If brand names become part of the cultural lexicon, protection
can disappear entirely. Apple Computers has been scrambling
to hold on to its rights to “pod”-related trademarks after
the word “podcast” was declared the new word of the year by
the Oxford English Dictionary. Oops. Making your brand a household
word can have some really unpleasant consequences.
And all of this murkiness is the devil’s playground. Large
trademark owners take advantage of the uncertainty of the
law by terrorizing smaller folks who may be using a similar
mark. It’s a form of legal bullying, and to some degree it’s
mandated by the nature of the law itself. If you own a trademark
and don’t police it or actively protect it, you can lose it,
as other people’s use of the mark whittles away at your mark’s
strength. And this can lead to some terrifically silly situations.
About 15 years ago, the owners of the punk club QE2 (located
where the Fuze Box now sits) got a cease-and-desist letter
from lawyers for Cunard Cruise Lines, stating that the nightclub
“appeared to be offering many of the same services” as the
QE2 cruise ship. Having just seen the Sic F*cks play a sloppy-drunk
1 AM set at the Q, I thought this claim was particularly hysterical.
Ships ahoy! But the lawyers were doing what they had to do—they
probably had no intention of actually suing the club, but
they needed to have some C&D letters in the file to prove
that they were actively protecting the mark in case the issue
ever came up.
But that’s not what Sweet Pea, Ltd. was doing. There was no
cease-and-desist letter (one of these days I’ll write something
about C&D letters, because their bark is usually worse
than their bite). These guys went straight to the lawsuit,
and were looking to make some fast money, not to police their
mark. To be sure, the Internet facilitated the lawsuit. Sweet
Pea wouldn’t have had any idea that 52 tiny companies were
selling shirts with the words “sweet pea” on them without
Google and the Web. But wonderfully, the Web also facilitated
the defendants’ ability to fight back, to band together, and
to engage the press, and to ultimately force Goliath to back
down. Fight the power, indeed.
—Paul
c. Rapp
Paul
C. Rapp is an intellectual-property lawyer with offices in
Albany and Housatonic, Mass. He teaches art-and-entertainment
law at Albany Law School, and regularly appears as part of
the Copyright Forum on WAMC-FM’s Vox Pop program. Contact
info can be found at www.paulrapp.com.
|
Classifieds
