Tiffany won $21 million from Costco, then an appeal court sent it back to a jury because the word Tiffany...
Tiffany and Costco spent eight years in the federal courts over one word on a price card. Tiffany sued on Valentine's Day 2013 after Costco's jewellery cases carried signs like PLATINUM TIFFANY .70 VS2,I ROUND DIAMOND RING next to unbranded solitaires, and by 25 August 2017 the Southern District of New York had entered a $21 million judgment: $3.7 million in profits trebled to $11.1 million, plus $8.25 million in punitive damages and interest. The useful part for anyone whose founder's name is on the door: a house name can carry a second, descriptive meaning inside its own category. Charles Lewis Tiffany developed a six-prong diamond setting in the late nineteenth century, and the trade has called that style a Tiffany setting in dictionaries and advertisements ever since. On 17 August 2020 the Second Circuit vacated the judgment in Nos. 17-2798, 19-338 and 19-404, holding that nothing stops a single word from being both a source identifier and a descriptive term within the same product class, and that whether Costco's sign meant the house or the mount was a question for a jury, not a judge. The record it sent back held 3,349 buyers, a refund letter about 1.3% of them acted on, and six who testified the signs confused them about who made the ring. The case settled in July 2021, terms undisclosed. The descriptive meaning of the name has been in the dictionaries for over a century.