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18 May 2018Copyright

QVC taken to court over skinny jeans

A New York-based fashion designer has accused shopping channel QVC of copying her slimming jeans, called SkinnyJeans.

In a lawsuit filed at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on Monday, May 14, designer Catherine Hart claimed that QVC, which also sells jeans, had used her “slimming fabrication and slimming wash pattern” on its own line of jeans.

Hart said that she met representatives of the shopping channel back in 2013 to demonstrate the jeans.

At the time, “QVC's market was saturated with low price, low quality in-house brands of denim, and there was large, unfulfilled market for better, higher-quality jeans,” said the claim.

One month later, in October 2013, QVC trademarked ‘How Slimming’ and ‘How Fitting’ for use on its own brand.

In March 2014, Hart’s company Skinny Brand Jeans entered into a licence agreement with QVC. Under the agreement, QVC was granted a licence to make and sell a lower-priced version of its jeans to be called ‘SkinnyJeans2’.

QVC employees were allegedly taught by Hart how to replicate each detail of the jeans in a “lower-priced Chinese-made version using Chinese denim”.

Then, the shopping channel allegedly put the wash pattern on its in-house branded jeans called G.I.L.I.

Soon after, Hart applied to register copyright for the slimming wash pattern and a design patent for her ornamental pattern.

She notified QVC in May 2016 of its “theft”, said the lawsuit, adding that a letter from QVC claimed there was no similarity between the original and the copied wash pattern.

Hart has accused QVC of trade dress and copyright infringement, and is seeking damages.

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