As we have discussed here, fashion is about nothing if not intellectual property, and most fashion intellectual property is comparatively easy to copy or emulate without great expense. If you have any success at what you do, the odds are fairly good that someone, somewhere on the planet will come out with what you believe to be a brand or product that infringes on your proprietary rights.
You will then have come to a fork in the road. The failure to take action to protect your rights may be used against you later. In the case of trade dress, for example, your silence may be used as evidence of everything from a showing that you suffered no lasting harm to the de facto abandonment of the right to the exclusive use of the trade dress. On the other hand, if you send out a strong cease and desist letter with a clear threat to sue for non-compliance but do not follow up in a reasonable time with a lawsuit should the recipient not comply, you may be deemed estopped (barred) from filing your lawsuit at a later date. That is why cease and desist letters typically threaten the “possibility” or the “potential” of the initiation of litigation—to avoid being estopped by the failure to carry out an explicit, promised remedial act.
Perhaps even worse, if you send a cease and desist letter that is strong enough to make the recipient fear an imminent lawsuit, and if the recipient believes it was within its rights to use the intellectual property that you claim infringes, it may make a preemptory strike. It would do that by filing a declaratory judgment action, asking a court to declare that what it has done was in fact lawful. To use jargon, when you have been so “d.j.’ed,” you have lost the “race to the courthouse door,” possibly to a “forum shopper.” For example, having been ready to sue in New York, where you are located or where you believe the law is favorable to your position, you may find yourself defending an action on the other coast in a court chosen by the plaintiff because it is near to its home base or in the belief that the law there is more favorable to it.
So there is an art in knowing when to send a cease and desist letter and what the tone and the content of the letter should be. As you may remember from your days on the playground, consider the advice you got never to make a threat you are not prepared to carry out and, of course, never to play the bully—because you just do not know what may come back at you.
Credit: Alan Behr
