[ed. This has nothing to do with the following article but it gives me a chance to tell the only Barbie joke I know: One day Ken and Barbie are getting a bit closer than usual and, perplexed, he looks in her eyes and says, 'I feel like there's something missing here, but I just can't seem to put my finger on it']
Bratz v. Barbie: Who’s the Bad Girl?
by Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker
Last January, at a courthouse in southern California, a remarkable memo came to light during a trial pitting Mattel, the manufacturer of Barbie dolls, against MGA, the much smaller company that makes Bratz dolls. The 2004 memo, which one of the MGA attorneys introduced into evidence, warned of a “rival-led Barbie genocide.” It went on in similarly doom-laden language: “This is war and sides must be taken: Barbie stands for good. All others stand for evil.”
Well, “evil” won yesterday, big-time. A jury awarded MGA $88.5 million in damages, endorsing MGA’s claim that Mattel had engaged in corporate espionage to ferret out and misappropriate the smaller company’s trade secrets. (I wrote about the Bratz Barbie fight for The New Yorker in 2006.) Through a series of court cases that began in 2004, it was initially Barbie shaking her contoured little bottom in a victory dance. In August, 2008, a federal judge in Riverside, California, ruled that Mattel owned the Bratz line and that MGA would have to stop selling the tarty dolls and pay Mattel a hundred million dollars in damages. The designer who had first pitched the Bratz dolls to MGA, Carter Bryant, was working for Mattel at the time, so his sketches and first so-called “sculpts” of the dolls belonged to Mattel, the company claimed—and the court agreed.
In January of this year, though, it was the Bratz girls’ turn to stick their tongues out at the competition—a move that suited them to a T. The Ninth District Court of Appeals sided with MGA, and overturned the injunction against selling Bratz, concluding, “America thrives on competition. Barbie, the All-American girl, will too.” Then, Thursday, a jury in Santa Ana, California, upheld MGA’s counterclaim about corporate espionage.
Now if by “evil,” Mattel had been referring to certain qualities of the Bratz dolls themselves, I might have said, yeah—evil-ish, anyway. The dolls, which came on the market just over a decade ago, are weirdly sexualized for playthings aimed at five- to ten-year-old girls—stiletto sandals, cushiony Botox lips, heavy eye shadow, and shop-till-you-drop, kept-girl attitude. They’re multi-ethnic, which is nice, but doesn’t quite make up for the rest of the package.
But Mattel wasn’t indicting the Bratz for any of that. In fact, it went for a similar look and attitude with its My Scene dolls. What it didn’t like was competition. On those grounds, it had a very weak case—and one that, had it been upheld, would have resulted in a paralyzingly broad notion of intellectual property. As the Ninth District ruling, written by chief judge Alex Kozinski, pointed out, Mattel “can’t claim a monopoly over fashion dolls with a bratty look or attitude, or dolls sporting trendy clothing. These are all unprotectable ideas.” What can be protected is not the idea but its specific expression: Stephanie Meyer didn’t have a monopoly on vampire stories, nor Degas on pictures of ballet dancers, and Mattel didn’t have one on fashion-forward plastic dolls.
Bratz v. Barbie: Who’s the Bad Girl?
by Margaret Talbot, The New YorkerLast January, at a courthouse in southern California, a remarkable memo came to light during a trial pitting Mattel, the manufacturer of Barbie dolls, against MGA, the much smaller company that makes Bratz dolls. The 2004 memo, which one of the MGA attorneys introduced into evidence, warned of a “rival-led Barbie genocide.” It went on in similarly doom-laden language: “This is war and sides must be taken: Barbie stands for good. All others stand for evil.”
Well, “evil” won yesterday, big-time. A jury awarded MGA $88.5 million in damages, endorsing MGA’s claim that Mattel had engaged in corporate espionage to ferret out and misappropriate the smaller company’s trade secrets. (I wrote about the Bratz Barbie fight for The New Yorker in 2006.) Through a series of court cases that began in 2004, it was initially Barbie shaking her contoured little bottom in a victory dance. In August, 2008, a federal judge in Riverside, California, ruled that Mattel owned the Bratz line and that MGA would have to stop selling the tarty dolls and pay Mattel a hundred million dollars in damages. The designer who had first pitched the Bratz dolls to MGA, Carter Bryant, was working for Mattel at the time, so his sketches and first so-called “sculpts” of the dolls belonged to Mattel, the company claimed—and the court agreed.
In January of this year, though, it was the Bratz girls’ turn to stick their tongues out at the competition—a move that suited them to a T. The Ninth District Court of Appeals sided with MGA, and overturned the injunction against selling Bratz, concluding, “America thrives on competition. Barbie, the All-American girl, will too.” Then, Thursday, a jury in Santa Ana, California, upheld MGA’s counterclaim about corporate espionage.
Now if by “evil,” Mattel had been referring to certain qualities of the Bratz dolls themselves, I might have said, yeah—evil-ish, anyway. The dolls, which came on the market just over a decade ago, are weirdly sexualized for playthings aimed at five- to ten-year-old girls—stiletto sandals, cushiony Botox lips, heavy eye shadow, and shop-till-you-drop, kept-girl attitude. They’re multi-ethnic, which is nice, but doesn’t quite make up for the rest of the package.
But Mattel wasn’t indicting the Bratz for any of that. In fact, it went for a similar look and attitude with its My Scene dolls. What it didn’t like was competition. On those grounds, it had a very weak case—and one that, had it been upheld, would have resulted in a paralyzingly broad notion of intellectual property. As the Ninth District ruling, written by chief judge Alex Kozinski, pointed out, Mattel “can’t claim a monopoly over fashion dolls with a bratty look or attitude, or dolls sporting trendy clothing. These are all unprotectable ideas.” What can be protected is not the idea but its specific expression: Stephanie Meyer didn’t have a monopoly on vampire stories, nor Degas on pictures of ballet dancers, and Mattel didn’t have one on fashion-forward plastic dolls.
