Legal disputes are increasingly being fought online, and any brand owner seeking to enforce its rights will find both the issues and the correspondence firmly placed in the public domain. Not that this should be a major problem, of course, and I don't think it's a bad thing. But clients and their lawyers should be in no doubt, that whatever they might say ("please do not post this letter on the internet/your blog etc"), anything they write will find their way online.
One recent example is luxury brand, Louis Vuitton's claim against the Danish artist Nadia Plesner. Ms Plesner designed a T-shirt and a poster featuring a Darfur victim holding a Vuitton handbag which she was selling as part of her Simple Living Campaign to raise funds for Darfur. According to LV, both the bag, and the design on the bag, resembled their own bandbags, and one of their idiosyncratic designs.
LV started by writing to Ms Plesner by email and "express mail", a letter which the artist has posted on her website. In pre-internet days, you would only get to see these sorts of letters when they were written to your own clients. Nowadays though, you get these classic cases of legal voyeurism as you find out what LV were saying before they got serious:
Although we applaud your efforts to raise awareness and funds to help Darfur, a most worthy cause, we cannot help noticing that the design of the Simply Living Products includes the reproduction of a bag infringing on Louis Vuitton' Intellectual Property Rights, in particular the Louis Vuitton Monogram Multiecolore Trademark to which it is confusingly similar. We are surprised of such a promotion of a counterfeit bag.
Except of course, it's not an actual bag. It's just a picture of one and according to Ms Plesner, it's different as she points out in her response, which she's also posted online. Not that it had much effect on LV who were clearly not impressed and they have now issued proceedings against her.
Who knows who will win, and whether LV will be bothered that some supporters of Ms Plesner take a dim view of their actions? We will see. Having made the case so public though, Ms Plesner now has the help of a couple of Dutch lawyers and a Danish one although how they are all going to agree, is probably more of a challenge than fighting off Louis Vuitton's claim.
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