CASE STUDY

Sunshine Ltd. was engaged in the business of compiling and publishing telephone directories of industrial and commercial enterprises. Sunshine solicited these enterprises to include their telephone number and, if they wished, an advertisement in the directory for a fee and offered a range of graphic services to create the advertisements for the directory. Sunshine's directory was called INFOPAGES, and a trademark had been registered in that name with the associated book design and logo. Each year new directories were prepared and sold to Sunshine's major customer, the telephone company, to include with its annual residential directory. Just before publication of the most recent directory, one of Sunshine's sales managers received a telephone call from a long-standing customer who inquired why Sunshine had approached him for a second time that year to insert an advertisement in the directory. The manager was surprised to learn this had occurred and suggested it must simply be a computer error that would be immediately corrected. The customer persisted, however, and described a solicitation letter which he had received from a company called Sunshin Ltd. The letter enclosed a clipping of the customer's own previous advertisement, which had been placed in the INFOPAGES directory. The clipping was stapled to an invoice for advertising similar to the invoice form used by Sunshine and bearing an almost-identical logo. The customer assumed that Sunshin was a division of Sunshine and had mistakenly solicited twice for the upcoming annual directory. The manager assured the customer that Sunshin was in no way related to Sunshine and that the recent letter was not a Sunshine solicitation in any way. When the sales manager contacted several of its other large customers, he learned that they, too, had received such letters and clippings of their own advertisements and invoices. Discuss the rights, if any, of Sunshine in this situation and describe what steps it may take to alleviate this problem, including any remedies that may be available.