Stop Staring! Wins Trade-Dress Suit
A jury awarded apparel brand Stop Staring! $500,000 in a trade-dress dispute with Bettie Page Clothing.
The decision, reached on Nov. 17, came at the end of a more than two-year dispute over the look of the two companies’ websites. A claim for a permanent injunction against Bettie Page is still pending, according to an attorney representing Stop Staring.
Paramount, Calif.–based Stop Staring filed suit against Las Vegas–based Tatyana LLC, owner of the Bettie Page brand, charging that Tatyana’s pink and green website too closely resembled Stop Staring’s site and was creating confusion among consumers who believed there was an affiliation between the two companies. (Stop Staring has since changed the look of its website and marketing materials, including the trade show booth the company sets up at the biannual MAGIC trade show in Las Vegas.)
“The ultimate result, in our view, is that that Bettie Page Clothing had a head start in developing a customer base that they wouldn’t ordinarily have,” said Peter W. Ross, an attorney with Los Angeles–based Brown Woods George LLP, which represented Stop Staring. “The jury found there was willful trade-dress infringement—in other words, that [Bettie Page was] intentionally trading on the goodwill that Stop Staring had built up. It’s one thing to come out with a line that looks very similar to someone else’s,” Ross said. “It’s another to take steps that may confuse people into thinking that it really is a different company’s line that they’re looking at—that can be done by having marketing materials that look very similar.”
Ross and Keith J. Wesley, his partner, said they believe this is the first trade-dress lawsuit concerning a website to go to trial.
“I don’t think it’s an accident that the first case to go to trial on this issue involved an apparel company,” Wesley said. “With these companies, in particular, the look and feel of their website is critical to their businesses. That’s what consumers see when they initially approach these companies.”
Stop Staring founder and designer Alicia Estrada was elated over the jury’s decision.
“I didn’t want to file a lawsuit, but this is what I had to do to defend what I had built,” she said. “When Bettie Page came along, Stop Staring was 10 years in the making. I had worked all these years to build a good name for myself.”
Bettie Page Clothing filed a counterclaim charging Stop Staring with wrongfully interfering with its business, but the jury disagreed. Jan Glaser, who co-owns Bettie Page Clothing with his wife, Tatyana Khomyakova, said his company would dispute the decision. Glaser contends that the jury based its decision on the similarity between Bettie Page’s current website and Stop Staring’s previous site.
“We feel the lawsuit is entirely without merit,” he said. “We disagree with the jury’s finding. We are hoping that before the verdict is entered, it will be reversed by the court. If it is not reversed by the court, we will appeal.”
