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May 2018 WINES&VINES 17 WINE INDUSTRY NEWS The right equipment can be the difference between a Work-of-Art or a simple garage sale piece. Della Toffola offers 50 years of experience in the design and manufacture of innovative equipment that delivers artistry in each production run. through. He spent all of our money and made all these promises. We took the loss and walked away from them, with 6,000 cases of aging inventory." Shortly thereafter, the Millers discovered in the spring of 2016 that Boyer "took these brands of ours and went to other suppliers and to Lot18 to print new labels." The wines were designated California rather than Santa Barbara, Miller said. When Turn Key slapped cease-and-desist orders on CustomVine and the affiliated Pen- rose Hill to stop selling wines under Turn Key's trademarked brands, "they accelerated their sales instead of stopping," Miller said. "All we wanted was for them to stop, but they sucked us into a year and a half of pain." CustomVine offered "to just walk away," Miller said, "and we said 'no no no, we need to know the damage here, we need to under- stand what happened to our brands.' " After a year of wrangling, in December 2017 the two sides reached the monetary settlement and received the District Court rul- ings: a finding against Boyer, another against Boyer and CustomVine for brand infringements (on Turn Key, Compass Point, Eleanora Marie and Wayside) and one against Penrose Hill for the Turn Key trademark. Boyer, who remains president and CEO of CustomVine (James is president), had no com- ment on the case. "Unfortunately [there's] nothing to talk about," he said via email. Boyer's lead attorney, Massachusetts-based Louis Miller Ciavarra, said that after extended discussions, "the parties got to a place where they felt they could reach an agreement and move on." But the saga is not completely over, because the Turn Key brands have been "tarnished for a long time," Miller said. "There's a lesson here in how other people disregard the value of your own trademarks. Once people take it and run with it, they can have it a long time. Then it takes a long time to repair the damage that's been done." Related litigation on the rise Protecting brands has been part of Wines & Vines' ongoing coverage on facets such as the vigilance needed to protect intellectual prop- erty and the basics on dealing with brands at risk. J. Scott Gerien, a partner with wine-indus- try law firm Dickenson Peatman & Fogarty in Napa, Calif., said that cease-and-desist orders such as those Thornhill used have limited ef- fectiveness. "Cease-and-desist is the first step," Gerien said, "because if it works that's great and sometimes people are innocently doing it, most of the time there's a resolution. But if people have bad intent, they're not going to go 'oh, we'll cooperate.' " He added that getting a national trademark is essential, especially in an era in which so many brands already exist. In December 2017 for example, Sonoma County's Davis Family Vineyards sued a newer Napa Valley winery called Davis Estates over trademark infringe- ment. Just recently, according to a report in Wine Business Monthly, Caymus Vineyards sued the Sonoma, Calif.-based real estate develop- ment company Caymus Builders. The wine company registered the brand Caymus with the U.S. Patent Office in 1994 and sued the development company after it had erected signs near areas where it was working on re- building structures damaged by the October wildfires. The wine company alleges such signs, and the development company using the name Caymus, "will likely cause confusion, mistake, or deception." But problems exist with even more generic names. "You have to be pretty original to find one that's available," Gerien said. "It is more difficult to find a mark that's clear, and as a result of that we are seeing more litigation." — Bill Ward