Corporate America Screws Little Girls

Slavery is exactly what this amounts to. The precedent this sets could be stretched into fantastic realms. What if I write a play while working for a company and that play goes on to become a hit movie–unlikely though that is. Does the company I worked for at the time I wrote it get to claim that the intellectual property belongs to them? What if I use situations I experience while at the job as part of the story in my play? It’s funny how employers don’t want to hire you unless you have experience in a given field and yet you can’t use that experience to change jobs b/c it infringes on the previous company’s intellectual property. It’s one thing to steal secrets from a company and take them to another. It is quite different to work for a company who makes America’s most wholesome example of professional woman/mother/malibu-home-owner and conceive of a doll that is the exact opposite. Corporations are master in this plantation country. That’s all there is to it.

Bob – Love your blog. We are having you on our radio show next week in Las Vegas The Basham and Cornell Show. (The only Progressive/Liberal show in Vegas.)I agree with your post. As a Barbie lover from childhood, this has turned me off to Barbie. Why can’t they share the wealth? If a composer or songwriter comes up with a new song while under contract to a certain record company, is she a slave to that record company — or can she put the song on her own label?The designer probably didn’t take the idea to Mattel first because Mattel would not allow Carter an ownership stake in his creation.xoLydia

Yeah being an ex art director this case has really gotten my hackles up. Plus i once worked for a creative director who was old Mattel guard and she had tacky oil seascape photos all over her office, never a creative thing came out of her mouth, I mean never!Mattel is creatively bankrupt and have been forever. Slavery is what they do over there if you’ve ever had any contact with them… its obvious. over worked, underpaid, corporate hackery. Dont even get me started on Barbie©!oh the plus side, Bratz© are so last years news, its all about HSM, Camp Rock and Hanna Montana well according to the child in my life.

That post was by Lee Stranahan.

The ruling is total crap, but my hatred for Bratz dolls is immense (Bratz Babies, i.e. slutty baby dolls? WTF?), so I’m having a hard time getting really pissed about it.

Again, not a fan either but I will also mention that there’s an interesting racial angle – the Bratz are very ‘urban’ and a mix of different races. Barbie…c’mon. So I think this is one reason for the success of the Bratz line – it recognizes the new reality of the US, where Barbie came up in Wonder Bread America.

Doesn’t the evilness of the ruling depend on the agreements made by the employee as a part of his employment. I am totally against corporate slavery, but sometimes we sign agreements with the companies we work for that signs away the rights to our creative endeavors during that time. At a very small, non corporate overlord software company I once worked for, it was standard for the engineers to sign an agreement that any software they wrote during the tenure of their employment was company property, whether it was targeted at our core audience or not. And we signed NDA’s as well. But we had a choice to read the documents before signing, and knew exactly what we were signing away.If the designer of the uber-slut dolls signed this kind of agreement over the intellectual property rights while employed at Mattel, then Mattel is in the right. I can’t imagine that they didn’t have an agreement over intellectual property in place, since small companies do them all the time. Perhaps the designer should have ended employment before making the designs and taking them to MGA or renegotiated the agreement with Mattel before working on things that s/he was most likely well aware would be property of Mattel.

The facts of the case aren’t clear to me – the desinger says he developed the idea while between gigs for Mattel, for example, but I don’t know that to be true. Mattel dropped a personal suit against the designer the day before the the MGA suit went to trial.In general though, it’s a government sponsored abuse of corporate power in my opinion – using the power of the government in order to serve corporate interests at the expense of employees and ‘we the people’. I feel that way about a lot of supposed intellectual property disputes.The company holds all the cards in the scenario you’re given. They can afford armies of lawyers and can sustain litigation for years.

Thom Hartmann had some CEI shmuck on this morning, arguing economic ideologies. I wish this case was mentioned. Because all libertarian CEI morons are for IP laws, because they’re property rights. And they worship at the altar of private ingenuity. So this ruling would tie them, as usual, in incoherent knots.

Who designs these dolls, anyway?? Ok, I realize “Barbie” was made in what — the ’60s? Bratz dolls look like hip-hop hos. I eve saw a Bratz knockoff line called, “Flava Girls,” who were even sluttier.These ‘marketing geniuses’ underestimate the minds of today’s girls. They’d TOTALLY go for a decently-clad but stylin’ and smart girl doll with a kickass past-time (ie hiphop dancer, veterinarian, American Idol winner, etc)…Come ON!!!

this is as american as the “rule of law”. Was it shakespeare who first had it in for lawyers?

Bratz, schmatz. Git yer dotter a Trailer- Trash Barbie for X- mas :http://i96.photobucket.com/albums/l167/debmon5/trailer_trash_barbie_jpg.jpg

Hey. Why couldn’t I post that link ?

Lee, I work in the pharmaceutical industry. When you go to work for them, you sign over all of your rights to inventions (i.e. patents) when you start. That is accepted and common practice. I am sure hidden in the Mattel contract, or other companies contracts, is very similar language. Many companies also include non-compete clauses in to prevent working for one company and moving up and out to another company working on the same thing. This isn’t Draconian, it’s SOP.