One maker of sexualized children’s toys has gotten a judge to crush another, on the grounds that Bratz’ creator violated its copyright and probably came up with the idea on Mattel time.
A judge on Wednesday granted an injunction sought by toy maker Mattel Inc. that bars rival MGA Entertainment Inc. from manufacturing or selling its popular pouty-lipped Bratz dolls. The ruling, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Riverside, follows a federal jury’s finding that Bratz doll designer Carter Bryant came up with the edgy concept while working for Mattel.
The same jury later awarded Mattel $10 million for copyright infringement and $90 million for breach of contract after a lengthy trial that ended in August.
Could Mattel have ever dreamed of manufacturing these revolting post-anime whore-kachinas by itself?
Regardless, this is an unpleasant result that favors intellectual property over innovation, assigning Mattel an entire category of toy as its proprietary sandpit.
On the other hand, there will be no more Bratz until it’s free and clear of appeals. For once, it’s almost worth it.
Gadget blog justifaction: grotesque dolls are articulated and capable of mechanical failure, esp. when put to non FDA-approved use by older youngsters.
Do I begin to point out how much stupid is in this decision?
So now my own ideas are owned by the company I work for? Who cares if I am a designer, engineer, or any other creative person in a company how can they own my ideas.
The funny thing is that employment contracts do specify that any ideas you come up with belong to the company.
I’ve always felt that because employment contracts are presented under duress (i.e. sign or no job), they should be unenforceable when put to the test.
This is strange. So, what are the boundaries here? Does it mean that they own the rights and can sue for copyright infringement for any and all female dolls?
Bratz is very generic since it resembles actual human beings. How can a company hold copyrights on the human form? This is insane.
Mattel did go head to head with Bratz with their My Scene Barbies:
http://z.about.com/d/toys/1/0/Y/B/BlingDolls.jpg
Even if the precedent sucks, I’m glad.
“Bratz” are ugly. Evil materialistic tweener mean-girls. They’re the kind of kids who would give Dirty Swirlies and otherwise make life hell for anyone who isn’t an alpha puppy.
OTOH, I think the “Bratz babies” are genius. That’s just how the Bratz would dress their kids after they get knocked up and drop out of high school.
I was once interviewing candidates for a crappy desk job in a financial office at a university. I offered the position to a gentleman who fancied himself a screenwriter.
He read the fine print and found that clause in the employment contract that said the University owned anything that you created while on the clock, which ostensibly is really intended for research scientists and the like. He turned down the job fearing that he would some day make it big and the university would find out somehow that he conceived of one of his genius screenplay concepts while on his lunch break or something, and try to sue him for his millions. I thought he was a moron.
The AP report is pretty thin. “came up with” is pretty ambiguous. If he was paid by Mattel to actually develop the concept and then took it to another manufacturer then it’s quite possible they invested a significant amount of money in it before it finally went into production.
But yeah, anything that gets Bratz off the streets can’t be all bad, especially if it means there will be fewer on the shelves during the holidays.
I had an employer who wanted me to sign one of these – and it wasn’t just ‘on company time’ it was ‘while employed by the company’, which I thought was a little extreme.
Fortunately I was already working there (they took over a contract and kept pretty much everyone where they were) and wasn’t a new hire. I didn’t have any trouble getting the legal department to write me a letter stating that they had no interest in anything I came up with that wasn’t a direct result of my paid work there.
My position wasn’t an inherently creative one, so it might be harder for someone like a toy designer. My point is just that boilerplate agreements like that are often open to negotiations. Just make sure you get it in writing.
just like with scrabulous, mattel should have cut this guy a deal rather than getting litigious. now they just look like shitheels
Woah! Just had a great idea about a new type of action figure for young boys. They’re called Pimpz and they can interact with Bratz in all sorts of interesting ways.
Shhhh, don’t tell mr. Bossman about this.
Around my house we call them ‘Slutz’ dolls.
At least Bratz are multi-ethnic from the get-go.
And while I refuse to let my 5 year old girl own any (although a dvd or two snuck in, and I’ve watched em..they aren’t great but they aren’t bad) I think the ruling for Mattel is wrong.
I sorta like the Pimpz idea
I’m really curious as to how the Jury found he “came up with the edgy concept while working for Mattel.”
I’d argue that this should be unenforceable due to incomplete contracting — there’s no way to know what every possible thought will be by you in the future and whether or not it’s directly work-related.
“Intellectual property” writ large is a privilege exercised by companies to legally morph labor (i.e. knowledge work) into capital.
In other words, they want to think they don’t need to “rent” you anymore, once they’ve secured the legal monopoly to “own” what you thought of.
@dculberson: the creator testified in court that he developed the concept on the clock, at work, and even had other mattel employees make his prototypes and design his logo (letting them think it was an in-house project). He also admitted to back-dating drawings and attempting to destroy evidence to make it look like he did the work while he was on hiatus.
@ #3 -
Good employers make the contract available to the prospective employee before the job is offered, so they know what they’re getting into.
@ #8 -
I read about this case when it first hit the news several months back (a year ago, maybe?) and remember that the guy developed the entire Bratz concept while at Mattel, for Mattel, they passed on it and a while down the road he lost his job and resurrected the Bratz idea at another company. It wasn’t quite as fishy as immediately bringing the idea elsewhere when Mattel rejected it, but it wasn’t as innocent as “oh, I just thought of this on my own time la-di-da.”
Well, I think that’s pretty much case closed.
You say “whore” (or “slut“) like it’s a bad thing. …prudes!
Re: Anonymous @16 / Kerry @17,
Ok, that nullifies my incomplete contract argument, but I’ll continue to assert that if Mattel passed on the idea, it’s up for grabs by any competitor who wants to hire this guy (or for this guy to start his own company).
The purpose of the market system is to give customers what they want, not just to keep existing companies in business. (c.f. the GM / Ford / Chrysler bailout debacle)
If I hired someone to come up with toy ideas for my company, then later discovered he developed a toy line while he was working for me and sold it to another company – taking a huge percentage of my sales, you bet I’d be pissed.
This isn’t about a big company suing a little girl for building her own Barbie out of clay or even suing another big company for making similar dolls.
I smell a rat…
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-fri-barbie-bratz-dec05,0,148518.story
“…The dolls can stay on store shelves through the holiday season, then must be recalled…”
Hmmm, the economy is in the dumper. How to increase sales? How ’bout a lawsuit to create an artificial scarcity that’ll last just long enough to boost Christmas sales and then be dropped after New Years? This is an incredible, Barbara Streisand’esque, marketing coup. Bravo!
You can be pissed. But you’re not ethically entitled to quash your competitor just because he bested you.
The fault lay with you because you failed to serve your customers as well as your competitor did. (Or failed to pay him enough to not desire seeking to compete with you rather than only working for you.) But most business owners and managers will conveniently fail to recognize this because of the self-serving bias — it’s easier to blame “unfairness” than oneself.
revolting post-anime whore-kachinas
Here’s a shiny new farthing, my lad! You’ve certainly earned it.
I know that all good yuppies are supposed to hate these things… ostensibly because they are supposedly “bad” for girls (but in reality, because crass consumer items offend their bourgeois aesthetics… A good yuppie goes to a small specialty shop and pays $100 for a wooden Danish toy that only costs €10 in Denmark! “Its European! And wood! And expensive!”)… but can’t anyone look beyond their own “These toys are for white trash and poor people, and that is definitely not me!” class posturing (doth protest too much!) see how destructive and horrible legal rulings like this are?!
Half the businesses in existence are people who get the idea during their day job “I can do this much better than my employer, maybe I should go in business for myself”. In your zeal to cleans society of elements of culture you find distasteful, you are willing to see people become permanent surfs for whatever big corporation they start their career in?!? Wow, people are certainly jerks!
Whorechinas!
Fun for modern girls and adventurous boys!
In response to some of the comments here, the case isn’t a tough call, nor is there any unfairness. The designer, Bryant, was paid by Mattel to design dolls. He had a steady paycheck, got benefits and worked in the kind of creative job that people would kill for. He also had a written inventions agreement that assigned to Mattel rights to the work he did relating to Mattel’s business, which obviously includes dolls. Bryant secretly used Mattel’s facilities and even other Mattel employees (who he lied to) in order to make up doll prototypes in Mattel’s design center. Instead of giving the project to Mattel, he sold it to a competitor for big bucks and quit Mattel. (He was not fired nor was the project ever presented to, let alone turned down by, Mattel, as some posters claim.) The jury found that Bryant created Bratz while a Mattel employee, so they were therefore owned by Mattel. As the jury also found, MGA spent years lying about Bratz’s origins to the media, the public and others. I would assume that anyone here who knew these facts — which are the facts that a judge and a jury found after hearing the evidence — would see there was deliberate wrongdoing by MGA and Bryant. Bottom line, you can’t run off and sell to a competitor the very types of projects your employer is paying you to develop. A five year old can understand that. And indeed Bryant and MGA did understand, which is why they conspired to lie and hide what they had done.
I hope everyone outraged at Mattel realizes another thing: The vast majority of brands in the toy world are owned by a handful of mega companies and the chances of a small toy maker coming to market with a product are very slim.
You know what toys in the 1950s-1980s were great? So many varied manufacturers who often swiped ideas from each other but ultimately realized that simply making newer toys would help them keep market share.
Also, I’m still not too clear on Mattel’s motivation. Is the Barbie market truly threatened by competition? I remember tons of Barbie clones being released over the years and all had meager shares and Barbie was always on top.
Bratz is successful because it’s a market Barbie doesn’t touch.
Truly unfair.
Bratz is successful because it’s a market Barbie doesn’t touch.
What market ? The “teach my daughter how to be a cheap, tacky slut” market ?
Oh noes! Now where will she learn ?!
Looking at the actual case this isn’t simply a big corporation exploiting a horribly exploitative clause in their contract.
If Bryant really did what the court documents are saying he did (designing it on the company dime, using other Mattel employees and lying to get it done) then this is more the case of an idiot trying to get away with idiotic things. And frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised considering the product he invented. It’s kind of like when the maker of Girls Gone Wild was indicted and sent to jail for all manner of bad business practices and sexual abuse charges: it came as a shock to literally no one.
The person who made a line of dolls centered around making your teenage daughters look like sluts, act like whores, and promote being stupid and shallow beyond even that of the Barbie brand comes as no surprise when it turns out he is also an idiotic, lying asshole too.
Yes, the contracts most big companies force their creative help to sign are horribly exploitative and over-encompassing, but this does not seem to be about that issue in this particular instance. If Bryant had created the concept of these dolls on his own time, even while still working for Mattel, or shown it to Mattel and had it turned down, that would be one thing. But he used conniving business practices and went behind his employers back during office hours, using company equipment to get it done.
He deserves this, even when many other creative types do not.