Miscellaneous

It Must Have Been a Jury of 8-Year-Old Boys

By Anne Skove, Esq.

If you ask a jury of elementary school boys, they'd call for an outright ban on Bratz.

The federal jury in the Bratz case stopped short of banning Yasmin, Sasha, Roxxi, Jade, and their plastic pole-dancing friends. It awarded toymaker Mattel $100m in damages. Mattel had asked for over $2 billion.

Mattel brought a copyright suit against MGA Entertainment, which foists Bratz on the world. The dolls were designed by some spawn of satan while he was working for Mattel; Mattel argued that it owned the rights, even though they passed over the idea and said spawn went to work for MGA.

Further proof -- for those who are not yet convinced -- that big-budget cases are rarely litigious member of the public v. big business, but usually business v. business.

Can punitive damages make or break a company? According to Reuters, "a different outcome could have put MGA into dire financial straits and handed control of its $1 billion-plus Bratz franchise to Mattel."

See Mattel Gets $100 mln in Bratz Case, Wanted Billions, Syantani Chatterjee, Reuters (August 26, 2008); Barbie 1, Bratz 0, Rick Aristotle Munarriz, The Motley Fool (August 27, 2008), which calls the win "a moral victory" for Mattel; and the pro-Bratz Catfight: Barbie v. the Bratz, Prof. Jeremy Telman, ContractsProf Blog (July 22, 2008).

Full post as published by court-o-rama.org on August 27, 2008 (boomark / email).