Week 8 EOC: Bratz Brawl

After reading up on the whole Bratz doll and Mattel case, my opinion on it is that the whole thing is pretty ridiculous. “The Bratz dolls were designed by a former Mattel employee while he was still working on Barbie dolls for Mattel. So Mattel had claimed that it owned what this employee drew up. But the employee insisted he was drawing the Bratz dolls on nights and weekends so Mattel didn't own them. The jury here agreed with the designer that Mattel has no claim to the Bratz dolls.”(link) Although Carter Bryant was working for Mattel, he was working on the design for The Bratz dolls on the side. It’s not like he stole ideas from Mattel or Barbie and tried to sell it to another company. He testified that he came up with the idea back in 1998, when he was on a break from working at Mattel. “In court, MGA attorneys accused Mattel of trying to crush Bratz because the doll line was giving the venerable Barbie doll a run for her money, while Mattel accused MGA of stealing its idea for Bratz and then working to cover up any hint the concept wasn't theirs.”(link) The case has been an ongoing trial for nine years but I feel that Mattel filed for lawsuit for all the wrong reasons, and it turned out that Mattel was in the wrong because they were sending spies to MGA and they actually stole ideas from MGA. “The jury in the retrial said Mattel had not proved its claims of copyright infringement and instead found that the company had stolen trade secrets from MGA and owed it $88.5 million. That was seen as a paltry amount for a case that analysts estimated had cost each side hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees alone.” (link)