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Three Strikes And You're In-Fringing? Online Retail Giant CafePress Defendant For Third Time
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Added: 12/20/2005
Type: Summary
Viewed: 543 time(s)
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Three Strikes And You're In-Fringing? Online Retail Giant CafePress Defendant For Third Time
On October 31, 2005 in Van Nuys, California, writer and performer Dailey Pike filed a $5000 small claims lawsuit alleging sales of counterfeit merchandise infringing on his USPTO registered trademark "I Wish These Were Brains" by one of the internet's largest retailers CafePress.com http://CafePress.com located in Foster City, California.
Before recently closing his CafePress shop, Pike himself had been a CafePress shopkeeper since 2001 selling apparel bearing his "I Wish These Were Brains" trademark.
According to Plaintiff Pike, the clothing line was conceived as a marketing device for Pike's movie idea titled "I Wish These Were Brains", a Faustian tale of a young woman who unwittingly sells her soul to the devil for bigger breasts only to realize they won't stop growing.
As a part of his small claims lawsuit Plaintiff Pike subpoenaed Defendant CafePress' founder Fred Durham to appear December 16, 2005 with sales records of CafePress shopkeepers who had been infringing his trademark.
By November 14, 2005 a little over two weeks later CafePress had hired Jill Pietrini, a partner at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the seventh largest law firm in Los Angeles, one of the top 250 law firms in the United States, to remove the small claims lawsuit to United States District Court, Central District of California, Western Division where it became Dailey Dennis Pike v. CafePress.com, Inc., case no. 2:05cv8109.
Plaintiff Pike's lawsuit is the third federal trademark infringement action against CafePress as defendant in 2005 alone. Two other lawsuits had previously been filed by CoExist, a clothing company based in Indianapolis, Indiana and label maker Avery Dennison based in Pasadena, California.
In recently filed papers Pike maintains that between 2001 and 2005 he made sales via CafePress of clothing bearing his "I Wish These Were Brains" trademark in almost every state of the union and internationally as he continued to build interest and try to find financing for his movie.
Plaintiff Pike contends being able to guarantee the licensing rights for merchandising is essential to obtain financing and CafePress has jeopardized those efforts because of their and their shopkeeper's infringements.
In 2003 Plaintiff Pike claims he made Defendant CafePress, and their intellectual property agent at the time Abdul Popal, aware of his trademark and the fact that competing CafePress shopkeepers were selling clothing bearing his registered trademark.
Pike alleges Defendant CafePress would remove the infringing products but weeks later he would find other CafePress shopkeepers infringing on his trademark. Pike claims he would bring the infringers to the attention of CafePress and the products would be removed but other infringers would soon appear.
In his lawsuit Pike alleges this pattern of behavior on the part of Defendant CafePress continued thru June of 2005 when Pike sent Defendant CafePress a cease and desist letter to CafePress' current intellectual property agent and in-house counsel Candice Carr.
Plaintiff Pike maintains Defendant CafePress never formally responded to his letter. He claims their willful infringement of his "I Wish These Were Brains" trademark continues to this day even as he prepares to appear as a Pro Se plaintiff in federal court.
Says Pike, "David vs Goliath doesn't begin to describe my situation. I feel like Gary Cooper in High Noon. Rocky Balboa against Clubber Lang. CafePress is one of the biggest retailers on the internet racking up tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in sales every year. Manatt, Phelps & Phillips is a legal juggernaut with unlimited resources. But I have no intention of giving up. I want justice."
Pike continued, "I went to small claims court to try and force CafePress to give me an accounting of sales by infringing CafePress shopkeepers. If as I believed it would be substantially more than the five thousand dollars I sought in my small claims lawsuit, I planned to ask for a dismissal of the suit and refile in state or federal court. Well CafePress put us in federal court and I intend to make a fight of it even if I have to refinance my house to do it. The simplest way I can explain it is what do you do when someone picks your pocket? Do you let them get away with it? Or do you chase them down the street? I want to tell a jury my story of what I can best describe as CafePress' serial infringement of my "I Wish These Were Brains" trademark."
ABOUT DAILEY PIKE-Dailey Pike is a comedian, writer, composer, producer and actor who has worked on dozens of television shows including Ellen, Drew Carey, Arsenio and Roseanne. He has appeared as a stand up comic at the Comedy Store, Improv, Laugh Factory, the Hollywood Bowl and Harlem's Apollo Theater. Over the last decade Pike wrote, produced and appeared in several musical comedies including "Gigolette", "The Drunk" and "All Men Are Dogs." Pike most recently created the broadband internet video on demand superstation Yuks TV.
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