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Is Your Brand Legally Cool Enough?

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Everyone's attention – the financial markets', most of all – has been riveted to last week's billion-buck, jury-trial ruling for Apple versus Samsung in the U.S. Doubtless an appeal will be waged. An earlier decision by a British court on kindred issues may have even more provocative, long-term implications. In that ruling, what resonates is more the cool than the cash.  

In the film Legally Blonde, Elle (played by Reese Witherspoon), as an absolutely unexpected Harvard law scholar, comes up with some totally improbable lines. Like: "It's impossible to use a half-loop stitching on low-viscosity rayon." Should a ditsy blonde be capable of such high-strung evidence?

Ask the counter question: Should a judge on an august English bench be empowered to deem a product legally un-cool enough? That's what happened in July, according to an article in The Guardian. "Samsung won a victory over Apple in the UK high court . . . after a judge ruled the design of its Galaxy Tab isn't cool enough to be confused with an iPad."

According to the judge, the Samsung products in question "'do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design. They are not as cool. The overall impression produced is different.'"

The ruling has a host of intellectual property implications – some of them amusing . . . and others seriously expensive in an attention-getting way:

  • Apple considered the Samsung products to be an encroachment, so much so as to take the battle to court. Apple's taking issue actually may have endowed consumer perception of these Samsung products with more competitive muscle than the court believes they have.
  • In a major way, Apple may have benefited Samsung with substantial free publicity. After all, being not quite as cool as Apple is, in fact, . . . pretty cool. Samsung's quarterly profits, by the way, are bulging.
  • Will copycat brands – touting their utility and not their design – now be able to dabble in a whole host of features as long they shroud those features in an intentionally un-cool, dowdy way?

Lastly, who would ever have thought that a judge would ever render an intellectual property verdict based on product coolness? Then again, who would ever have thought Elle could have rolled through Harvard Law School like a Sherman tank?