Terri Welles \nLOS ANGELES - Former Playmate of the Year Terri Welles has prevailed - a federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit filed by Playboy which she has said "was like being sued by my own father."
U.S. District Court Judge Judith Keep turned down Playboy's claim that the 1981 Playmate of the Year violated trademark laws by using her Playmate of the Month and Playmate of the Year titles on her Web site (www.terriwelles.com). Welles says the judge found she used her titles in good faith, according to a press release on the site.
She says she'd put disclaimers on the Web site well before the magazine sued her in early 1998, saying the site wasn't sponsored by or affiliated with Playboy. Keep's ruling added that Welles's Playmate titles had become part of her public identity and the magazine had shown no evidence of consumer confusion.
Welles says it was only after she refused to join in Playboy's CyberClub Web site that the magazine started objecting to her using her Playmate titles on her own site. She says the magazine doesn't normally obstruct other Playmates from using their titles on behalf of their post-Playmate careers.
Welles sells autographed photographs, a newsletter, fan club membership, and nude photos on her Web site, and she draws considerable advertising from other adult Web sites.
"I feel like I've been sued by my father," she said when Playboy first filed its $5 million suit against her. "I don't have the bunny (emblem) anywhere on my site and all the pictures are mine."
Playboy had not only argued it owned the Playmate trademarks, but it also claimed Welles broke trademark law by embedding the magazine title within her site's coding, thus directing online search engines to deliver her Web address when searching for Playboyl, according to CNET.
The company claimed it sued only after spending several months trying to resolve the issue with Welles out of court. But Welles said she had a First Amendment right to post her own resume and her own photographs online to earn a living, and accused the magazine of trying to keep all its Playmates on its Web site exclusively. Legal experts at the time told CNET she had an excellent chance of making a free speech case.
Her being Playmate of the Year 1981 was nothing more than a statement of fact, said intellectual property attorney Robert Welsh in Los Angeles told CNET when the suit was filed. "The analogy would be someone who contends today that they were the 1981 winner of the Academy Award for best supporting actor," he said. "The real question is whether you're trying to use a trademark as an identified source of a product or service."
