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weird business network sued alongside rearz for selling unauthorized ABDL diapers


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Today on my lunch break, I greatly enjoyed reading this NYT article. It's a bit hard to describe (the title of this thread is really bad and also the best I could do) but it's investigative journalism into this truly bizarre and surreal business empire centered around a bible school. The author never quite figures out how it works as a whole, but it seems to be a money-laundering/scam-adjacent scheme where they own hundreds of Amazon stores and websites that sell ordinary stuff at jacked-up prices. I'd definitely recommend reading it.

But I was really surprised to see well-known purveyor of ABDL diapers Rearz come into the story. Here's the relevant bit of the article, in case it doesn't sound interesting to you:

"In another legal dispute, from February of this year, Adult Printed Diapers LLC sued Faithfulness LLC, another one of Mr. Park’s companies, for selling “Aww So Cute” diapers, which are an Adult Printed Diapers trademark. It’s not clear where Faithfulness LLC got the Adult Printed Diapers diapers, but the lawsuit alleges that Faithfulness LLC’s co-defendant in the lawsuit, Rearz, Inc., made an unauthorized purchase of diaper inventory directly from Adult Printed Diapers’ supplier in Shandong, China."

The article also links to the actual court filing of said lawsuit. It says that Rearz sneakily bought Aww So Cute diapers direct from APD's manufacturer in China, then sold them in "mystery boxes". Possibly, they also sold the remaining stock to one of the many tendrils of the Park conglomerate (although the lawsuit doesn't allege this part, it just says that the Park company and some other defendants somehow got Aww So Cute diapers and sold them).

Shady dealings in the ABDL diaper world. Who knew?

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I remember hearing about this back when the claim was initially filed. Basically, Aww So Cute (who has a horrid reputation as a company in the ABDL world) got a bit steamed that other people had gotten and were reselling their products. They put out a blanket claim that named TONS of companies, including Rearz, LittleForBig, and a lot of small medical stores around the US. However, from what I recall, the case fell flat as there was an abundance of proof needed on ASC's side, especially regarding the Rearz claim, and they couldn't prove it. 
I loved studying IP Law in my legal courses, so this was a field day for me 9 months ago lol, and we've since seen several cases that also support Rearz's ability to resell product that they've purchased, so long as they do it in specific ways (which they do). 

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19 hours ago, rachelkirwan said:

Wow this is complex. Did Aww So Cute go out of business? 

They seem to still be around.

15 hours ago, AverageHero said:

I remember hearing about this back when the claim was initially filed. Basically, Aww So Cute (who has a horrid reputation as a company in the ABDL world) got a bit steamed that other people had gotten and were reselling their products. They put out a blanket claim that named TONS of companies, including Rearz, LittleForBig, and a lot of small medical stores around the US. However, from what I recall, the case fell flat as there was an abundance of proof needed on ASC's side, especially regarding the Rearz claim, and they couldn't prove it. 

I didn't hear about this when it happened, but I seem to remember that Rearz claimed or tried to claim ABDL as a trademark? Were these events related at all?

Did any of the other defendants end up in trouble? I gather they actually were selling the diapers, so did the judge decide that it was ok for them to do so, or could APD just not prove that they were selling them?

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I loved studying IP Law in my legal courses, so this was a field day for me 9 months ago lol, and we've since seen several cases that also support Rearz's ability to resell product that they've purchased, so long as they do it in specific ways (which they do). 

So Rearz is still selling aww so cute diapers? Does 'specific ways' refer to the mystery box strategy? It seems really weird to me that one company would be legally allowed to sell products from another company without their permission, but then again I don't know anything about IP law.

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35 minutes ago, supernerd222 said:

I didn't hear about this when it happened, but I seem to remember that Rearz claimed or tried to claim ABDL as a trademark? Were these events related at all?

Did any of the other defendants end up in trouble? I gather they actually were selling the diapers, so did the judge decide that it was ok for them to do so, or could APD just not prove that they were selling them?

So Rearz is still selling aww so cute diapers? Does 'specific ways' refer to the mystery box strategy? It seems really weird to me that one company would be legally allowed to sell products from another company without their permission, but then again I don't know anything about IP law.

Those were two unrelated things, but the attempt to file the trademark fizzled out pretty badly. As for the other defendants getting in trouble, there's still no real "verdict" on the case, it will probably flounder about a bit, but the ultimate outcome will vary depending on how they sold them. 

That leaves just that point, the "how they sold them". If they listed them as "Aww So Cute" with the ASC logo and images, then they were advertising another product with the intent of using the name and value of that product to make profit. Rearz, however, was selling "mystery boxes" and didn't use the ASC name, logo, or images, which means that they were just reselling diapers, not telling customers they were getting a specific product that they would have heard of and has merit behind its name. This doesn't really work in a lot of scenarios, but here's an example of one. A company can't sell you a specific movie using that movie's title and images from the movie to sell them. However, if they said "Buy a movie for $XX" and didn't say what the movie was, that'd be fine. However... most people wouldn't buy a random movie because it could suck. The ABDL world doesn't have that kind of brand diversity, so if they said "A mystery box of random ABDL brand diapers", that really narrows it down to like 6 companies and none of them are really that bad... which means people would buy it. And that's the whole reason that ASC filed the suit in the first place. There's not enough brand diversity, which makes competition really stiff between them all. If they aren't getting any cut of what another company is making off of selling their product, they want to stop it because they can't afford to not stop it. But Rearz didn't owe them anything because they (assumingly) acquired the product through legal means, then sold them without using any of their branding to help make the sale, which didn't infringe on copyright. Its a kind of crazy system lol.

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That is pretty crazy.

The idea of adding a shop to OmoOrg for products like this has crossed my mind more than once, but dealing with having to organize bulk purchases from vendors and handle shipping and so on makes it seem risky and hard to actually make a profit on, assuming we could ever even get reasonable a deal with major suppliers.

Would be neat if we could just get a special partnership with an existing reseller but that's probably not likely, haha.

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I don’t understand how they wanna trademark a fetish, trademark their diaper brand ok sure but trying to trademark abdl as a whole is stupid because there is a lot of companies that do abdl stuff and you cannot trademark a fetish as something only you can make products of, try telling that to the millions of companies that sell items for other fetish stuff like Spencers and shit like that

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On 11/29/2018 at 8:38 PM, AverageHero said:

 But Rearz didn't owe them anything because they (assumingly) acquired the product through legal means, then sold them without using any of their branding to help make the sale, which didn't infringe on copyright. Its a kind of crazy system lol.

You're absolutely right about all of this, but the pedantic perfectionist in me has to point out that this is a trademark, not copyright, issue. That will be all ::recedes back under the rock where he spends most of time::

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