Morgan Lewis

Ninth Circuit Allows Competitor to Copy Leatherman's "Pocket Survival Tool"

By Intellectual Property

Subscriptions

Morgan Lewis Title

  • published on:

    January 2000

downloads/links:

pdfView White Paper

The Ninth Circuit made it easier to knock-off unpatented products. In a case involving the well-known Leatherman “Pocket Survival Tool,” the Court held there was no trade dress protection for that tool even where a competitor admitted selling an almost exact copy.

On December 17, 1999, in Leatherman Tool Group, Inc. v. Cooper Industries, Inc., the Ninth Circuit ruled that, in a product configuration case, where the product is nothing more than an assemblage of functional parts, and the individual parts are arranged or combined a certain way to result in superior performance, the overall appearance of the product is not protectable as trade dress.

For the full story, please view the PDF.