As we reported in August, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment will be offering a limited edition 'Up: Luxo Jr. Collectible Desk Lamp Set', which features a working replica of the now famous Luxo lamp along with the Blu-ray release of 'Up', when the title is released on Blu-ray this Tuesday. Soon after the announcement, Luxo AS - the manufacturer of the Luxo lamp - sued Disney for trademark infringement.
Luckily for Blu-ray fans, both parties have reached an agreement out of court, and the 'Up: Luxo Jr. Collectible Desk Lamp Set' will be released, as originally scheduled, on November 10th. The base of the lamp is specially designed to hold your Pixar Blu-ray collection, including 'Monsters, Inc.' which is scheduled for release that same day.
I'm all for defending your trademarks and all that, but how does Disney bringing attention to a lamp manufacturer's brand hurt them? Frankly, they should have taken advantage of the attention and free publicity to move themselves up in the competitive arena of the home lighting market.
You can bet, that if it were the other way around, and Luxo was using Disney characters to sell their lamps, Disney would have sued the pants off of Luxo. Good for Luxo in this case!
yeah i'm having a problem with that in I made a preorder for UP's Luxo edition... they never cancelled my preorder though I know there are infact boxes of them already given out to stores...
Of course now you can't order it off Amazon... But I really really want that 10 dollars off Monsters inc too....
So amazon needs to hurry up and put it back up for order then.
But yes Disney should have spoken to Luxo before annoucements were made.
The reason Luxo sued is that Disney was profiting heavily from use of the brand name without any compensation to the trademark owner. Luxo apparently has a deal with Pixar regarding the name of the short and even the name of the "character", but to sell a product of the character and use the brand name "Luxo" infringes on Luxo's intellectual property.
No...this lawsuit sounds pretty legit to me. Correct me if I'm wrong but Disney went off and
manufactured a Luxo lamp not with Luxo. The original Disney/Luxo agreement probably did not
include any kind of manufacturing right. Disney's agreement probably only included the right to
use the name and the image in an animated film and associated publicity. Maybe it also included
the right to create a "toy", but Luxo thought that meant plush and Disney thought they could
manufacture a copy of the lamp.
It's common for companies to assume they have rights that they don't really have or take the
rights figuring that the other company can't afford a lawsuit. I actually design rights management
software and one of the reasons we're successful is that rights management has become both so
complex and so important. You can't exploit a right that you have unless you know you have it
and if you exploit a right you don't have, you can get sued big time, like this case. If Disney had
our software or software like it, someone would have asked the software, "do we have the right to
make a lamp, what countries do we have that right in and for what license period, manufacturing
period and sell-off period do we have that right and if we exploit that right, what is it going to cost
us?" and the software would have said (although not in these terms), "sorry, you can't do it".
