Mattel loses copyright case against ex-employee and Bratz inventor

Carter Bryant worked at Mattel designing hairstyles and outfits for Barbie dolls in a 'collectibles' range. While there he came up with the idea for a more contemporary series of glamorous, up-to-date dolls and successfully pitched the idea to MGA Entertainment.

Bryant handed in his notice to Mattel and worked on the idea in his spare time with MGA while working out his notice. The dolls were a commercial success, spawning many other related toys and even a film.

When Mattel found out that the man behind Bratz had been its employee it sued MGA, claiming that any new products created by its employee should belong to it.

While a US court agreed and handed Mattel control of all of Bratz's trade marks, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has reversed that decision.

The Court has said that Bryant's employment contract was not clear enough to establish beyond doubt that his Bratz concept belonged to Mattel. Even if it was, the Court said, the toy maker could only claim rights over a relatively small part of the Bratz franchise because copyright law protected only the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves.

Bryant's contract said that as an employee he agreed "to communicate to the Company as promptly and fully as practicable all inventions […] conceived or reduced to practice by me (alone or jointly by others) at any time during my employment by the Company. I hereby assign to the Company […] all my right, title and interest in such inventions".

"The district court held that the agreement assigned Bryant’s ideas to Mattel, even though ideas weren’t included on that list or mentioned anywhere else in the contract," said the judge, Alex Kozinski. "We conclude that the agreement could be interpreted to cover ideas, but the text doesn’t compel that reading. The district court thus erred in holding that the agreement, by its terms, clearly covered ideas."

Judge Kozinski also said that it was not certain that those parts of Bryant's invention that were covered by the contract could even belong to Mattel, because the contract was "ambiguous" on whether it covered material invented outside of work hours. That ambiguity was enough to derail Mattel's copyright claim, he said.

Judge Kozinski went on, though, to deal with that copyright claim, saying that any claim could only relate to copyrightable material, a small subset of Bryant's invention.

"Assuming that Mattel owns Bryant’s preliminary drawings and sculpt [prototype doll], its copyrights in the works would cover only its particular expression of the bratty-doll idea, not the idea itself," he said. "Otherwise, the first person to express any idea would have a monopoly over it. Degas can’t prohibit other artists from painting ballerinas."

"MGA was free to look at Bryant’s sketches and say, 'Good idea! We want to create bratty dolls too'," he said. "Ideas, scenes a faire (standard features) and unoriginal components aren’t protectable. When the unprotectable elements are 'filtered' out, what’s left is an author’s particular expression of an idea, which most definitely is protectable."

The Court found that what was new and copyrightable about the Bratz dolls was so unoriginal that it did not deserve the broad-ranging copyright protection afforded to more original works, and which the district court gave it.

Even if Mattel had the rights it claimed to have through its employment contract with Bryant, these rights would only apply to the copyrightable material in this narrow way, he said. This gives the idea of 'similarity' a legalistic meaning very different to the everyday meaning, he ruled.

"Although substantial similarity was the appropriate standard, a finding of substantial similarity between two works can’t be based on similarities in unprotectable elements," he said. "When works of art share an idea, they’ll often be 'similar' in the layman’s sense of the term. For example, the stuffed, cuddly dinosaurs at issue in [another case] were similar in that they were all stuffed, cuddly dinosaurs – but that’s not the sort of similarity we look for in copyright law."

"'Substantial similarity' for copyright infringement requires a similarity of expression, not ideas," he said. "The key question always is: Are the works substantially similar beyond the fact that they depict the same idea?"

"MGA’s Bratz dolls can’t be considered substantially similar to Bryant’s preliminary sketches simply because the dolls and sketches depict young, stylish girls with big heads and an attitude," he ruled. "We fail to see how the district court could have found the vast majority of Bratz dolls, such as “Bratz Funk ‘N’ Glow Jade” or “Bratz Wild Wild West Fianna,” substantially similar – even though their fashions and hair styles are nothing like anything Bryant drew – unless it was relying on similarities in ideas."