Plaintiffs sued Carolina for violation of the Plant VarietyProtection Act, false advertising under the Lanham Act, and breach of contractarising from their agreement for the sale of a PVPA-certified variety ofcentipede grass called TifBlair. Carolina was allowed to sell TifBlair until Turfgrass ended theiragreement in 2006; afterwards, according to plaintiffs, Carolina unlawfullycontinued to sell TifBlair. I’m only going to discuss the Lanham Act claim.
The court declined to grant plaintiffs summaryjudgment. The issue was that Carolinacontinued to use marketing materials describing TifBlair simply by changing thename of the grass to Carolina Green. Plaintiffs argued that the descriptions in the marketing materials wereparticular to the properties of TifBlair, causing confusion about theattributes and quality of TifBlair versus Carolina Green. Carolina admitted that it didn’t develop anynew variety of centipede grass and that Carolina Greeen was merely its brandingname for common centipede. This“arguably eliminate[d]” any factual dispute over the falsity of Carolina’smarketing statement that “In 2007 Carolina Fresh is proud to introduce CarolinaGreen centipede, a new variety developed for improved ...” However, otherelements of a Lanham Act violation remained disputed, specifically materiality,deceptiveness (not really clear what that means if this is a literal falsity case), and whether plaintiffs suffered harm. Also, there was a genuine dispute overwhether the language really did describe unique properties of TifBlair.
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