Mattel corporation handed legal defeat over Bratz dolls

Mattel suffers surprise defeat in court: The toy juggernaut waged a seven-year legal battle with MGA, a much-smaller company. At stake was claim to the Bratz empire, the line of glammed-up dolls that during the middle of the last decade was worth over $1 billion. MGA won today by jury verdict; they found Mattel had misused MGA’s trade secrets (MGA accused Mattel of entering toy fairs with fake credentials). The price for Mattel is $88.4 million, which is a lot to lose over nabbing a concept as elementary and obvious as Bratz. source

Posted by Chris Tognotti • 0 Comments • Permalink

crime In 2009 Shawna Forde, the leader of Minutemen American Defense, committed a home invasion near the Arizona/Mexico border, hoping to find drugs to sell for the group’s finances. They ended up shooting and killing a Hispanic father and his daughter, aged 9, both U.S. citizens.
verdict A court sentenced Forde with the death penalty yesterday, finding her guilty of orchestrating the home invasion and subsequent killings of Raul and Brisenia Flores. The girl’s mother, who survived the shooting with injuries, said Brisenia was shot point-blank while begging for her life.
response Latino activists are upset by the lack of coverage this story received compared to the murder of Robert Krentz last year, which caused stridently anti-illegal immigration rhetoric and policy to flourish. Compared to the tepid response to this case? Yeah, it’s a starkly bad double standard. source

Posted by Chris Tognotti • 0 Comments • Permalink

$1.92 million? Pssh, that’s fine! The Department of Justice put their two cents into the most anti-consumer case of our time, one in which regular person Jammie Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay a huge sum to the RIAA. What did they say? Here’s what they submitted to court: “Defendant’s suggestion that the actual harm can be measured to the ‘tune of $1.29 for each of the 24 songs’ … ignores the potential multiplying effect of peer-to-peer file-sharing.” Wait, what? source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 3 Comments • Permalink

21 Apr 2011 16:34