Judge Clifton begins his opinion in Mattel, Inc. v. Greiner and Hausser, published this morning, as follows:
Barbie, the ubiquitous doll produced by Mattel, has been a regular visitor to our court. This time she brings with her an issue of personal jurisdiction — not over her, but over a German toy company which has questioned her ancestry by asserting that Barbie was a copy of its doll and that Mattel had infringed its patent and other intellectual property rights. The German company, Greiner & Hausser GmbH (“G&H”), previously asserted claims to that effect in a lawsuit filed in federal district court in Los Angeles in 1961, more than 40 years ago. That lawsuit was resolved by a dismissal with prejudice of those and other claims. Today, Barbie generates over $2 billion in wholesale revenues each year, a sum which helps to explain why Barbie comes to visit us so frequently. It presumably also helps to explain why a lawsuit was filed in Germany in May 2001 by G&H, claiming that it had been defrauded by Mattel when it entered into a set of related agreements with Mattel in 1964, shortly after the dismissal of the previous California litigation, and seeking damages in the form of a royalty on every Barbie doll sold since that time.
The Court reversed the dismissal of Barbie's suit in the District Court: "We conclude that the subject matter of Mattel’s current lawsuit — which concerns and is essentially defined by the claims currently asserted by G&H in Germany — is sufficiently related to the action filed in California by G&H in 1961 to support personal jurisdiction over G&H in the current case, at least at this stage of the proceedings."
I noted some of Barbie's earlier legal problems here and here.