UPDATE, APRIL 21, 12:31 P.M.: The sluttier, younger chick wins!
A federal court jury in Santa Ana not only rejected claims that MGA Entertainment's popular line of Bratz dolls violates the copyright of Mattel's Barbie, but the panel awarded MGA $88.4 million for trade secrets
misappropriated by Mattel.
]
The jury found Mattel “acted willfully and maliciously in misappropriation of any trade secrets,” reports Reuters.
This legal battle has been raging since 2004 (catch up on the history in the original post below). A different jury in 2008 ordered MGA and its chief executive
Isaac Larian to pay Mattel $100 million. That was thrown out on appeal last year. The case returned before Judge David O. Carter in Santa Ana because his U.S. District Court jurisdiction includes Mattel's corporate offices in El Segundo.
The failure of management there to settle the case with MGA will go down as a “tremendously bad decision,” according to at least one industry analyst.
“It means they wasted $400 million
or so of shareholder money to get zero return,” BMO Capital Markets' Gerrick Johnson tells Reuters.
One prays Ken canceled his hair-frosting appointment to console a distraught Barbie.
ORIGINAL POST, JAN. 13, 7:24 A.M.: Considering the preponderance of plastic, empty-headed bleach blondes
one finds around these parts, at least a few have likely found their way
into the federal courthouse in Santa Ana. But the two fitting the same
description going before a judge at the Reagan today have achieved icon
status without boob jobs, sugar daddies or Balboa Bay Club pool
privileges.
They are Barbie and the Bratz, the girlhood dolls of different generations.
Mattel Inc., which owns Barbie, is trying yet again to prove in court that MGA Entertainment
Inc. stole the toy company's intellectual property when it created the Bratz line a decade ago.
In 2004, Mattel alleged MGA hired away a Mattel employee who had originally created the Bratz sketches for Mattel. A jury in 2008 awarded the worldwide toy brand a cool $100 million. But the 9th District Court of Appeals overturned that verdict, so back before Judge David O. Carter the two sides go.
In the months leading up to the new trial, MGA has accused Mattel of destroying evidence and other legal misdeeds that Carter has already indicated the jury will not hear. But the judge will allow MGA to present evidence of Mattel dispatching “gumshoes” to infiltrate
toy fairs at which MGA displayed its products. Mattel has called those accusations part of a “meritless,
last-minute effort to deflect attention from MGA's years of
well-documented wrongdoing.”
Meanwhile, toy-industry watchers say the Bratz line is not as hot as it was back in
the day, that the legal fees to fight off Mattel have already left MGA crippled.
“If Mattel wins, what do they win?” Sean
McGowan, a toy-industry analyst at Needham & Co., tells Reuters. “They get a shoddy
brand that's a shell of its former self.”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.