Gibson Gets An Injunction Over PaperJamz; Retailers Ordered To Stop Selling Them

If you happened to have received a PaperJamz guitar toy for the holidays this year, you may want to hang onto it as a collectors' item. In November, we wrote about how Gibson, the famed guitar company, was suing a bunch of companies over PaperJamz. The main target, of course, was Wowwee, the toymaker who makes the devices (which are plastic -- not actually paper -- guitars with a capacitive touch screen that turn your air guitaring into something a bit more real), but Gibson also sued a bunch of retailers, including Walmart, Amazon, eBay, Target, etc. for selling the toys.

Eric Goldman now lets us know that Gibson successfully got an injunction against all the defendants, with the court ordering them to stop selling the toys, just days before Christmas, though the defendants quickly appealed the ruling. The full injunction is embedded below.

When we first posted this story, there was an interesting discussion in the comments. Many people felt that Gibson was definitely in the right here -- as the designs did seem pretty clearly to copy Gibson designs. I still question how much (if any) "harm" this actually does to Gibson, and wondered why Gibson wouldn't just use this as an opportunity to market its own products more -- and maybe even offer upsell opportunities for PaperJamz users.

However, what may have been more interesting were claims in the comments that Gibson's lawyers misidentified a bunch of websites in the initial lawsuit. The lawsuit claimed that Wowwee's own websites acknowledged that the styling was modeled after Gibson's guitars, but apparently, at least some of those websites may not have actually been Wowwee's at all, but third parties, who were simply pushing people to Amazon affiliates or other sites. If that's the case, it calls into question certain aspects of the rest of Gibson's case as well.

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