July 22, 2010

"The concept of depicting a young, fashion-forward female with exaggerated features, including an oversized head and feet, is... unoriginal as well as an unprotectable idea."

Writes 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski, giving the victory to Bratz over Barbie.
Mattel argues that the sculpt was entitled to broad protection because there are many ways one can depict an exaggerated human figure. It’s true that there’s a broad range of expression for bodies with exaggerated features: One could make a fashion doll with a large nose instead of a small one, or a potbelly instead of a narrow waist. But there’s not a big market for fashion dolls that look like Patty and Selma Bouvier. Little girls buy fashion dolls with idealized proportions —which means slightly larger heads, eyes and lips; slightly smaller noses and waists; and slightly longer limbs than those that appear routinely in nature. But these features can be exaggerated only so much: Make the head too large or the waist too small and the doll becomes freakish, not idealized.
(PDF of opinion here. Short news article here.)


Have Patty and Selma Bouvier ever been mentioned in a court case before?

9 comments:

q12345q6789 said...

- mmmgghmmmh
- mmgghhmmgh (coughs)*

*spelling?

AST said...

Oh, good! That means I can go ahead with my doll idea, Skankz!

Morgan Warstler said...

Oh, good! That means I can go ahead with my doll idea, Althouse!

Who I sandwich somewhere in between Barbie and Bratz.

Jason (the commenter) said...

Morgan Warstler: Who I sandwich somewhere in between Barbie and Bratz.

Will it have all the functionality of a RealDoll?

Chase said...

Since we're talking about females and their value -

it is now obvious that JList members completely conspired to coordinate attacks on Sarah Palin:

Chris Hayes of the Nation wrote in with words of encouragement, and to ask for more talking points. “Keep the ideas coming! Have to go on TV to talk about this in a few min and need all the help I can get,” Hayes wrote.

Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation noted that Obama’s “non-official campaign” would need to work hard to discredit Palin. “This seems to me like an occasion when the non-official campaign has a big role to play in defining Palin, shaping the terms of the conversation and saying things that the official [Obama] campaign shouldn’t say – very hard-hitting stuff, including some of the things that people have been noting here – scare people about having this woefully inexperienced, no foreign policy/national security/right-wing christia wing-nut a heartbeat away …… bang away at McCain’s age making this unusually significant …. I think people should be replicating some of the not-so-pleasant viral email campaigns that were used against [Obama].” . .

Time’s Joe Klein then linked to his own piece, parts of which he acknowledged came from strategy sessions on Journolist. “Here’s my attempt to incorporate the accumulated wisdom of this august list-serve community,” he wrote. And indeed Klein’s article contained arguments developed by his fellow Journolisters.


Oh yeah - it didn't mean anything.

Fucking liberal journalists and the damage they daily do to the United States.

Beta Rube said...

But the ones with idealized shapes and faces rarely say "it's a free lunch boys, come and get it."

Joe said...

Now if we could only get judges to see how unoriginal and obvious most software patents are.

HKatz said...

Patty and Selma are hilarious. Maybe we can tie them into a discussion of public employees, since they work at the DMV. Of their jobs, they said something like this: "There are days when we don't let the line move at all. We call those weekdays. Heh heh heh" (*light up cigarettes*).

Brian said...

Kozinski, as always, is quick with the humor, but the social toll of bringing up young girls with unrealistic expectations of head size is a serious matter, not to be mocked.

See this important documentary, surveying the problem.