p2pnet.net News:- Microsoft got egg all over its face when it tried to get heavy with Mike Rowe, a Canadian who’d had the effrontery to launch a web site with mikeroewsoft.com as the url.

Now another Canadian, Barbie Anderson-Whalley in Calgary, Alberta, has just lost a battle with Mattel Toys who’d accused her of cyber-squatting, says CTV.

Mattel owns and markets Barbie dolls worldwide.

Anderson-Whalley owns a shop in Calgary called, appropriately, Barbie’s Shop. It sells, “custom clothing & hot brands for bad boyz & girls”.

Not surprisingly, she also has a web site called barbiesshop.com.

Enter Mattel.

“Even though Anderson-Whalley’s site has been up and running for four years, Mattel only complained last July,” says CTV. “That’s when she got a court summons in which she was described as a cybersquatter whose online efforts were diluting the company’s world famous trademark.”

Anderson-Whalley put up the good fight, but in the end, she was beaten by Mattel’s deep pockets.

“I can’t afford to play the game,” she’s quoted as saying just days after receiving a $8,300 US bill from her US lawyer.

In 1999, Mattel tried it on with Utah artist Tom Forsythe whose “Food Chain Barbie” series of photographs had nude Barbies in suggestive poses among kitchen appliances.

Mattel claimed copyright infringement and demanded that Forsythe stop selling prints. The case was finally settled this June when a federal judge ordered Mattel to pay Forsythe $1.8 million in legal fees and court costs, calling Mattel’s suit “frivolous” and “unreasonable.”

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See:-
get heavy – Microsoft -v- mikerowesoft, p2pnet, January 30, 2004
lost a battle – Barbie abandons legal battle with Mattel, CTV, December 2, 2004
suggestive poses – Barbie-in-a-Blender Day, http://p2pnet.net/story/1903 p2pnet, July 14, 2004

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