From The New York Times:
There’s no place like Tiffany, the famous jeweler says on its website — and that includes Costco.
A federal district court judge has ordered Costco to pay Tiffany more than $19 million for selling generic diamond engagement rings that were marketed using Tiffany’s name.
The rings in question had a pronged setting that Costco said is “commonly known as a ‘Tiffany’ setting,” however, some of the display cases simply described the rings as “Tiffany” instead of “Tiffany setting” or “Tiffany style.”
Judge Laura Taylor Swain ruled on Monday that Tiffany is entitled to $11.1 million as profits for trademark infringement, plus interest, and $8.25 million in punitive damages, which was awarded by a jury in October.
Judge Swain also said Costco was permanently prohibited from using “Tiffany” as a stand-alone term when selling its products.
. . . .
Tiffany sued after it discovered that salespeople at Costco were responding to customer inquiries by calling certain solitaire diamond rings “Tiffany” rings.
Furthermore, the salespeople “were not perturbed when customers who then realized that the rings were not actually manufactured by Tiffany expressed anger or upset,” Judge Swain wrote.
“Tiffany has never sold nor would it ever sell its fine jewelry through an off-price warehouse retailer like Costco,” the lawsuit said.
. . . .
“This was not a case about counterfeiting in the common understanding of that word — Costco was not selling imitation Tiffany & Co. rings,” Costco said, emphasizing that the rings were not marked with the Tiffany name, and were not sold using Tiffany’s trademark blue boxes.
The judge was not swayed by these arguments, however.
“Costco’s upper management, in their testimony at trial and in their actions in the years prior to the trial, displayed at best a cavalier attitude toward Costco’s use of the Tiffany name,” Judge Swain wrote.
Link to the rest at The New York Times
PG says you and Costco should respect trademarks belonging to other people.
Heh heh. This reminds me of the lawsuit back in the 90s when Honda, I think, had an ad saying that James Bond would like their car. The James Bond franchise was not amused, and a reporter on that story explained, “Bond has a license to kill, not drive a cheap car.”
Maybe Costco was having a “hold my beer” moment when they tried this stunt.
I’ll be honest. I don’t know much about diamonds or fine jewelry. If I saw “Tiffany rings” advertised at Costco, I’d assume they’d made a deal with that famous Tiffany company to sell their rings. Costco makes a lot of deals with a lot of companies to sell nice stuff. And the “Tiffany setting” sounds to me like what I’d take as the standard setting for diamonds these days, so using that name for what basically means “the normal way” would confuse me.
But if I was actually going to spend money on a diamond, I’d do some research first. Not everyone does.
It’s hard to believe that anyone who knows Tiffany’s, the store, would also believe their purchase at Costco came from the famous NY jewelers.
Of course, anyone who has heard of the jewelry store would wonder, when wandering around Costco with a shopping cart and seeing the use of the name attached somehow to low-cost knockoffs, how they got away with it.
I guess a judge agreed.
Costco would never sell a single Tiffany ring. You’d have to buy a case of twenty.
And they would all be shrink-wrapped into one unit.
It went downhill when they offered a Kleenex-style tissue for their crocodile tears…