"Barbie has finally kicked her rival Bratz doll to the curb."

The legal battle the Daily News (predictably) calls a "catfight."

Feel free to discuss the legal issues:

Mattel claimed the sassy Bratz dolls were the brainchild of one of its own designers, before he went to work for the rival and gave the upstart its signature toy....

Earlier this year, a jury awarded Mattel $10 million for copyright infringement and $90 million for breach of contract after members agreed that Bratz designer Carter Bryant had developed the concept for the dolls while working for Mattel.

Mattel subsequently requested that MGA be banned from making and selling the Bratz dolls, and Federal Judge Stephen Larson made it happen Thursday.

"Mattel has established its exclusive rights to the Bratz drawings, and the court has found that hundreds of the MGA parties' products, including all the currently available core female fashion dolls Mattel was able to locate in the marketplace, infringe those rights," Larson said.

And the dire commercial consequences: "MGA must immediately stop making all 40 dolls in the line and has until after the holiday season to remove them from store shelves." Presumably, there will be some sort of settlement that will allow the dolls to continue to be made, with Mattel raking in much of the money.

But law and commerce are not everything.

Let's talk about aesthetics. There's a lot of talk about the difference between Bratz and Barbie, but look at the picture of "Chat Divas Barbie" at the link. Not only does Barbie now look about 13 years old, she's got her mouth open in the can't-stop-talking position. I have never even accepted Barbie smiling. To me, Barbie has always been this face:



She doesn't smile. She's not a child. She's a glamorous, sophisticated woman. She's not an empty-headed chatterbox. She's a deep mystery. What are her thoughts? She will not tell you.

"Please God, I Have So Little: Don’t Take Scrabulous Too."

That's the name of a Facebook group, mentioned in this NYT article about what is a difficult problem for the Hasbro and Mattel, which own the rights to the board game Scrabble. Scrabulous plainly rips off Scrabble, so the companies could use the law to crush Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, who created Scrabulous (and make $25,000 a month on advertising). But the Agarwallas have made Scrabble popular among huge numbers of young people, and they are now: 1. motivated to buy the board game, and 2. primed to hate any bad corporations that take away their fun.

“If you’re Hasbro or Mattel, it isn’t in your interest to shut this down,” said Matt Mason, a consultant to the entertainment industry and author of “The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism.”

The board game industry will be forced to adapt, Mr. Mason predicts, just as the music industry has adjusted to unauthorized downloads of songs. “If something’s already out there and proven, the companies should go with it,” he said.

"This is a very hard case. I'm thinking very hard."

Said 2d Circuit judge Guido Calabresi at oral argument yesterday, reminding me of that "Math is hard" Barbie doll that Mattel had to reconfigure when feminists complained. But, it's common for judges to call cases "hard." Yet it's odd to say — at oral argument — "I'm thinking very hard." It sounds like a quip. It's a hard case, so I'm thinking hard. But it's not an amusing case. It's the case of Lynne Stewart, the lawyer who was convicted of aiding terrorists, and the hard question was the requisite level of intent:

To prevent [Sheik Omar Abdel] Rahman from advocating further violence, prison officials had required Stewart and the rest of Rahman's legal team to pledge not to carry messages on his behalf. Stewart broke that pledge. In one instance, she called a reporter in Cairo to announce that Rahman was urging a terrorist organization to withdraw from a ceasefire with the government of Egypt.

Stewart has said her goal was to keep Rahman relevant in Egyptian politics and improve his morale. That argument evinced little sympathy from the bench.

"You can have the intent of serving a client," Judge Calabresi said, "but if the means of furthering that intent are a conspiracy to kill people, than don't you have that intermediate intent as well?"

"Barbie is a very proper lady and she is not happy about being portrayed as something that she isn't."

"We are going to sue and we hope that this teaches people a lesson. Also, Barbie is 46 years old, she should be respected!" So said a spokesperson for Mattel, explaining why it's threatening to sue the Brazilian artist Karin Schwarz for her exhibit of photos depicting Barbie as a lesbian.

Isn't the whole point of a doll that you impose your imagination on it and play out the fantasies that are in your mind? It's inherent in the nature of dolls. How can Mattel now claim that Barbie somehow comes with restrictions? Or are they saying, do what you want in private, but don't display photographs recording how you chose to play with your dolls?

Go to Flickr and search for the tag "Barbie doll." Are you going to sue all these photographers? I'd link to some that I find especially delightful, but I'm afraid it might upset the photographer, so you'll have to explore over there on your own.

IN THE COMMENTS: Readers recommend other artistic works that use Barbie. And Michael Farris says:

This is fairly insane. Barbie and her friends have been used in sex role playing games by kids since they were invented.

What other earthly purpose does Barbie serve if not to fuel kids (half-baked and usually horribly, horribly wrong) ideas about sex?

Elizabeth says: "My childhood Barbies were oh so lesbian."

Artists, their Barbies, and the law.

Much as I feel I should carefully read the Supreme Court cases that came out today and provide some enlightenment on the subject, I am going to address a different legal topic: "Judge Says Artist Can Make Fun of Barbie." You wouldn't think anyone would need a judge's opinion to be free to make fun of Barbie (the doll), but in this case Mattel sued the artist, Tom Forsythe, who was selling photographs of the doll. Click on the link to see one of the photos--5 naked Barbies lying in a baking pan about to be cooked into, apparently, enchildas.

In the summer of 1999, Mattel sued Mr. Forsythe for copyright and trademark infringement.



After a lengthy legal tussle, which included a series of appeals, a federal judge late last week instructed Mattel to pay Mr. Forsythe legal fees of more than $1.8 million.



"I couldn't have asked for a better result," said Mr. Forsythe, 46, of Kanab, Utah. "This should set a new standard for the ability to critique brands that are pervasive in our culture."



...Mattel can appeal the award, but the company would have to appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which had earlier instructed the district court to consider awarding legal fees...

Why should Mattel have to pay the defendant's attorneys' fees? According to the judge, the case was "objectively unreasonable and frivolous," as Mattel's "sophisticated" legal counsel had to have been able to figure out, so the choice to bring a lawsuit has to be seen as an effort to pressure the artist to give up what he had a right do by dragging him into frighteningly costly litigation. Exactly! Great decision! And thanks to the artist for not freaking out and giving up when Mattel sued him.