The showrooms are off-limits to competitors, the suit states. MGA alleges Mattel's supervisors and senior executives provided training and financial support for this spying. In its lawsuit, MGA accuses Mattel employees of going to Kinkos and printing fake business cards, "and had Mattel accounting create mocked-up invoices, so they could flash 'evidence' of their fictional business cards and lie their way into the private showrooms of competitors.
Mattel is accused of buying small video recorders, "paid for by Mattel," and bringing these cameras to photograph and videotape what they saw in those private showrooms, the lawsuit states.
MGA alleges Mattel employees stole "confidential competitive information - including price lists, advertising plans, and unreleased product attributes," according to the lawsuit. It also claims the company rewarded the employees who swiped the information.
MGA alleges that Mattel provides "express instructions" in an page "how to steal" manual created by Mattel executives. It states that the manual taught "Mattel's corporate spies on the most effective means to steal their competitors' trade secrets.
Mattel attorney John Quinn told the jury in U. Closing arguments Thursday by Mattel signaled that the federal trial, which is in its seventh week, is near an end. The line was launched in , and instantly began taking market share from Barbie, whose sales once accounted for more than three-quarters of all fashion doll sales, but have sunk to less than two-thirds.
The lawsuit has been closely watched by the toy industry. Much of their office flirting, conducted not by telephone but by e-mail, concerns her clothes: microminis and see-through blouses—Bratz clothes. D aniel : If walking past my office was attempt to demonstrate presence of skirt, can only say that it has failed parlously—Cleave. B ridget : Shut up, please.
I am very busy and important. How dare you sexually harass me in this impertinent manner? D aniel : Message Jones. Mortified to have caused offense. Will avoid all non-P. Deeply apologetic. Like your tits in that top. Mattel began to panic. Eventually, according to Lobel, an anonymous letter tipped Mattel off to the truth: Bratz had been created not by Isaac Larian or by any of his children but by Carter Bryant, who, when he was hired by Mattel, had signed an intellectual-property agreement: everything he created during his employment at Mattel, it said, belonged to Mattel.
Intellectual property takes the form of patents and copyrights, legal instruments derived from the practices of fifteenth-century Italian republics. As Bracha points out, early patents and copyrights were not understood to involve ideas.
That transformation came in the course of the eighteenth century, when the courts began to understand ideas as things that could be owned and ownership of them as having the characteristics of property rights.
In , patents and copyrights had only lately taken on this meaning and force in English common law when the U. Not everyone agreed with this premise, which pits the property rights of authors and inventors against a public interest in books and inventions. Few followed his lead. They also adopted a Romantic notion of authorship—fetishizing the originality of the fevered, Byronic genius—though jurists like the Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story found the standard of unstained originality all but useless for adjudicating copyright disputes.
The reason to protect a property in ideas, at least originally, was to promote creativity both by rewarding authors and inventors for what they do and by, after a fixed time, releasing their ideas to the world. The standard of originality in intellectual property has, historically, been low, because everything, to some degree, copies at least part of something else.
Good ideas are cobbled together out of other ideas, even bad ideas, and, for people to keep having new ideas, old ideas have to be set free. The reign of authors and inventors began coming to a close in the eighteen-eighties, with the rise of corporate liberalism. Authors and inventors there might still be, but, when they were employees, their employers owned their ideas. Corporate ownership of ideas, the dramatic extension of the terms of copyright, and a wild expansion of what counts as protectable intellectual property have together undermined the original purpose of intellectual-property law.
Nine out of ten patents granted in the United States are now owned by corporations. Congress passed ten copyright-extension acts in the course of the twentieth century; copyright now lasts for seventy years after the death of the author.
Corporations have attempted to claim exclusive legal rights to everything from yoga moves to genetic sequences. Tattoos are protectable intellectual property, but nearly all tattoo artists operate outside that legal realm, following, instead, a set of industry norms.
Pornography, which has historically been the first to adopt and adapt to new technologies, is generally lax about copyright enforcement and has instead devised a new business model, based on sharing not content but experiences. By operating outside intellectual-property law, each of these industries has thrived, both creatively and economically. A counter case could be made that industries that are vigilant about copyright infringement—action-figure franchises, say, or television sitcoms—may have made a lot of money for the corporations that own them, but the results have not generally been distinguished for their creativity.
Calls for reform, often sounded, have not been heeded. One of the loudest and sharpest critics of the intellectual-property corporate rampage was Judge Kozinski.
As Lobel reports, Kozinski is that rare bird—a judicial celebrity. He hobnobs with Hollywooders, and kept his own IMDb page, where he had personally rated more than a thousand films. A movie buff and a libertarian, Kozinski is also a free-speech advocate, a position that extends to both pornography and intellectual property.
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