GUMMY BEAR SONG FREE

GUMMY BEAR SONG FREE

Today on the show, Eddie Oygur's quest to free the humble ugg boot from the iron grip of the Deckers Outdoor Corporation, what it tells us about this system where everyday words can be fenced off as private property and the force threatening every trademark in existence. And along the way, the word ugg itself became this invaluable piece of intellectual property.

Since the 1980s, Ugg boots went from a cozy niche in the world of footwear to a multibillion-dollar global market, warming the illustrious toes of Britney Spears and Sarah Jessica Parker. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Hello and welcome to PLANET MONEY. (SOUNDBITE OF JOHN ROWCROFT'S 'PYRAMID THOUGHTS') HOROWITZ-GHAZI: What did you know about, you know, international trademark law when this all started? His mission - to push the case as far as it needed to go in order to cancel the trademark itself. Eddie would take on Deckers at huge financial risk. Instead, they were going with option two. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Eddie and his lawyers decided they would not be settling with Deckers over this lawsuit. What is right is right, and I'm here to do what's right.

OYGUR: They thought if they bullied me like this, I would buckle up and say, oh, I'm sorry. But Eddie Oygur, he does not respond well to intimidation. And many of those businesses went for option one - to avoid enormous legal costs and settle with Deckers. Over the years, the company had come after several mom-and-pop ugg shops. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Because Eddie was not the first producer of generic Australian uggs to have been sued by Deckers. He said, we can talk to them and tell them that you're not going to sell anything out of America anymore. The lawyer told him, yes, Eddie, this is serious business because a case like this could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even enough to bankrupt Eddie's company. Eddie got his lawyer on the phone, asked him if he really even had to respond to this thing from all the way in the U.S.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: So it didn't make sense to him that this American company was claiming ownership over the word. OYGUR: Every man and his dog knows that it's Australian term for sheepskin boots. But he did know that in Australia, ugg was a commonly used, everyday word. He'd run his business mostly on handshake deals over the years. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Eddie didn't know all that much about trademarks at this point. I'm going, what? These guys are dreaming. They wanted all my stock for destruction. Deckers claimed that what he had done was trademark infringement, and now they were hitting him with this big, menacing lawsuit. And if you look at Ugg brand boots next to any generic Australian uggs, including the ones Eddie sold online, it can be kind of hard to tell the difference. And apparently, they had evidence that Eddie's company had sold a few pairs of boots online to buyers in the United States - boots that were listed as uggs. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Deckers owns the American trademark for the Ugg brand. They want to take me to court for selling Ugg boots into United States and that I violated their trademark. It was a letter from an American company called the Deckers Outdoor Corporation. And the problem at the center of Eddie's legal fight is what you're allowed to call these boots, how you're allowed to use the word ugg.įor him, it all started back in 2016, when he arrived at work one morning to find an official-looking piece of mail from the U.S. It is also a generic category of footwear - you know, like cowboy boots or flip-flops. For Australians, Ugg is not just a particular brand of boot. HOROWITZ-GHAZI: This kind of blew my mind. OYGUR: Any footwear that's made from sheepskin and has fur on it in Australia, it's called ugg. And I didn't understand this kind of key thing about these boots until Eddie explained it to me. In addition to leather jackets and earmuffs, Eddie makes his daily bread from selling what he calls ugg boots. And Eddie runs a leather goods business out of Sydney, Australia - been in the game for over 40 years. This story is all about Uggs which, if you haven't seen these boots, they're usually about calf high, sort of suede on the outside, wooly on the inside. They are ugly, if you really look at them. Eddie Oygur, the Australian businessman at the center of this legal case - he falls somewhere between those two camps.ĮDDIE OYGUR: It's a sheepskin boot, for God's sake. The case was focused on a particular kind of footwear that a lot of people seem to love and a lot of other people love to hate on. SYLVIE DOUGLIS, BYLINE: This is PLANET MONEY from NPR.Ī while back, I found out about this kind of odd confrontation playing out in the courts that I just could not resist digging into.

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