Shutting Down Birthday Parties for Trademark Infringements

Here's an interesting post from the law blog at the Wall Street Journal on kid's birthday parties and the problems you can run into when your kid wants his favorite cartoon character to appear:

For law students looking for a little freelance in-house trademark work, one option might be to police fake handbags or allegedly infringing doggie toys. That seems easy enough. But how about putting the kibosh on a kid’s birthday plans? Could you do it?

On the front-page of today’s WSJ, Katherine Rosman takes a look at parents whose party plans for their children are getting tripped up by worries of trademark infringement over costumed characters, such as Dora the Explorer, Elmo and SpongeBob. The companies that provide the costumes are skirting liability by commissioning costumes that only slightly resemble the characters, and have names like “Explorer Girl with Backpack,” “Big Red Tickle Monster” and “SquishyGuy.”

Rosman writes: “The relationship between birthday parties and intellectual property has become more fraught as children’s television has gone beyond ‘Sesame Street’ and become a multi-billion-dollar business. . .[T]o sustain live-entertainment and theme-park revenues, most companies that own rights won’t offer licensed, authentic costumes that can be worn by professional birthday-party entertainers.”

This new trend of trademark enforcement is not without fallout. Miriam Sorkin, an office manager in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., threw a fourth-birthday party for her daughter in May and arranged for a costumed impersonator of Dora the Explorer. Though the walk-about “Dora” had the expected pageboy haircut and backpack, her expression was blank and her legs appeared out of proportion to the rest of her body. “When Dora came out,” Mrs. Sorkin says, “none of the kids would go to Dora, including my daughter, and a few of the kids started crying.”

Back in 1993 my bank opened a new branch in Laguna Hills. As part of the grand opening we wanted to have some famous kid's characters on hand in order to attract young families to the event. We hired a "Barney the Dinosaur" lookalike, but couldn't advertise him that way. We had to advertise a "purple dinosaur" because the guy that did the character (and the bank) could get sued if we said "Barney". It was all pretty silly.