Depending on how the cookie crumbles, a Plano company may not be all smiles.
Eat’n Park, a Pennsylvania bakery and restaurant chain, says it has caught Plano-based Cookies by Design selling smiley-face cookies that it says are “confusingly similar” to its own.
And it’s suing.
Eat’n Park says it has a trademark from 1987 for the “sugar cookie having raised design of a smiling face.” In its lawsuit filed in a federal court in Pennsylvania on Dec. 31, the company asks that Cookies by Design stop selling its version of smiley cookies and pay an undisclosed amount of dough in damages.
A key ingredient of Eat’n Park’s case is the lawsuit’s Exhibit A, which shows a circle with two round eyes, a dot for a nose and a perky smile.
Here’s the Eat ‘n Park Smiley cookie
and here’s the Cookies by Design cookie:
At the beginning of the school year I usually send WifeGeeding and her team a cookie bouquet from a local store. I just looked up smiley faces on their website to see how close they could be to being sued.
Silliness. A) the smilies all vary quite a bit, B) how can any one firm "own" a smiley icon anyway?, C) I do love a cookie bouquet myself…=) When I lived in Valley Ranch, the baby and I frequented the local shop quite a bit…..
Well…somebody needs to tell Eat’n Park that their smiley-faced cookies look like….what's the word? Oh yeah…SH#T compared to the Cookies by Design smiley-faced cookies.
Cookies By Design should sue Eat’n Park for demeaning their cookies like that.
Yea, well, I hope that Eat'n Park wins. Cookies by Design is NOTORIOUS for threatening lawsuits against anyone that tries to market cookie gifts. God forbid you use the term cookie bouquet – even though it's become as generic as air….