Lawyers R Not Amused and Not Backing Down
The name is Toys R Us, but to Michael Lichtenberg, it looks more like Legal Muscle R Us.
Lichtenberg, owner of Tans R Us tanning salon in Spring Valley, is the latest target of the toy store chain’s vigorous and unabashed campaign to preserve the virginity of its treasured trademark.
It began in 1987 when Lichtenberg sought a federal trademark for his fledgling business. That aroused the New York-based attorneys for Toys R Us, who opposed Lichtenberg’s trademark application and began sending him stern letters.
Lichtenberg tried to retreat by withdrawing his application. It didn’t work. Once it engages in an infringement fight, Toys R Us takes no prisoners.
On Friday, Lichtenberg got a letter telling him to stop using R Us within three months. The implication “OR ELSE” fairly leaped from the page.
“Why are they trying to ruin me?” said Lichtenberg, 38, who kept his day job as a therapist at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Mission Gorge even after opening Tans R Us. “What possible threat am I to them? They don’t sell suntans. We’re not competitors.”
Toys R Us has heard it all.
In two decades it has dissuaded more than 700 companies from using R Us or a variant and has filed dozens of lawsuits. Extremism in the defense of a toy empire that includes 358 Toys R Us stores and 112 Kids R Us stores is seen as no vice.
Toys R Us attorney Roberta Bren notes that Toys R Us has several spinoff trademarks: Computers R Us, Shoes R Us, Portraits R Us and more.
“Therefore it is possible that someone might see Tans R Us and think Toys R Us has gone into the tanning business,” Bren said. “That dilutes the value of our trademark. We prefer to avoid legal action, but once we start we never back down. And that means damages and legal fees.”
Lichtenberg complains that he has spent two years marketing his parlor as Tans R Us and building up good will by, among other things, sponsoring a float in the Mother Goose Parade. Only recently has the business began to flirt with profitability, he said.
“I’m just a working stiff trying to survive,” Lichtenberg said.
He wonders if it might help if he changed the wording to Tans Are Us. Or if he explained to a judge that his R, unlike the toy chain’s R, is not written backward.
Not likely, said Bren. Both gambits have failed in other cases, and she has legal briefs ready and waiting.
Just Check the Oil
Letters I never finished reading.
“Dear Tony:
“Would you like to increase your ratings next season? Would you like to win a prestigious award in the media? Or would you simply like to increase your level of productivity while reducing stress?
“Any and all of these things can be accomplished if you get a mental tune-up from Bill and Carol Baras . . . “ founders of the Hypnos Morpheus clinic in Mission Valley.
Sorry, I can’t see paying for a tune-up for my mental outlook. I’m looking for a newer model anyway.
Close, but No Carnivore
It happens every time piranhas hit the news. The ill-tempered fish suddenly are “spotted” everywhere: lakes, streams, bathtubs, toilet bowls.
So it was not altogether surprising last week when an excited fisherman took a possible piranha to the Oceanside Police Department. He had hooked the 2-pounder in Lake Calavera east of Carlsbad.
Just a week earlier, a verifiable piranha had been found in a lake in Santa Barbara.
The Oceanside P.D. transported the suspect to the San Diego office of the state Department of Fish and Game. A state biologist was summoned for a positive identification.
The verdict: close but no carnivore. It was a piranha look-alike called a pacu, a nasty-looking but harmless fish without the razor teeth or snapping jaw.
They’re not native, but you can buy one in a fish store. When people get bored with them or decide to disassemble their aquariums, sometimes a pacu will end up in local waters.
