L.L. Bean is suing a company that makes customized promotional products for selling bags that it says are too similar to Bean’s own iconic canvas totes.
That other company is called 4Imprint, and the similarity that Bean’s lawyers are complaining about is that it’s a white canvas bag with straps and a reinforced bottom in a different color. No, really; here’s a pic from Bean’s legal filing, via the Portland Press Herald:
And they’re calling it trademark infringement, though there’s a question of how an prpetty generic thing like “different colored straps” could become a company-specific trademark in the first place1 –
Actually, that question might be answerable, because Bean has been on the receiving end of a similarly flimsy lawssuit from Skechers, over shoes with “graceful, sweeping, gently rolling lines and slopes” that Skechers claimed “create the ornamental appearance of the heel of the shoe and make it visually appealing.”
That case was called patent infringement, because Skechers claimed to have patented that rounded, gracefully curved shape… which just coincidentally happens to be the actual shape of the average human heel.
Bean could have argued that one. I’m not a lawyer, and Skechers is a big footwear brand, but I highly doubt that they’re big enough to patent the shape of the human body. Instead, Bean settled and apparently learned an unfortunate lesson about the effectiveness of legal trolling, because that’s exactly what the tote-bag lawsuit looks like.
The world being what it is, though, I was already asking myself before I’d finished that first, short BDN story was: why am I seeing this? Local media tends to treat L.L.. Bean more gently than this.
A quick search didn’t turn up any recent scandals2 or obnoxious political affiliations for the company or its CEO, so I don’t have an answer. Not until further developments give us more info, anyway.
It’s not impossible. There’s a limit to how stupidly generic a trademark can be before the PTO starts laughing, but the bar is pretty low…
…other than ongoing complaints about their anti–consumer practices, anyway, which have been largely ignored by local media for years…
Ray of Infamy 
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