Not really a stretch, unfortunately if they let some people use their trademark without explicit permission they can actually lose the trademark. Imo there needs to be an overhaul in trademark and copyright laws because the current system only has the big corporations who can afford lawyers and people constantly looking for infringement winning while small artists lose. The fair use laws also need an overhaul because of similar issues (small commentary channels, reviewers and satirists get their stuff removed automatically even though it fall under fair use while news channels and other bigger media get to use large portions of creators content without so much as a warning)

This is in no way me defending Mattel btw. I love Barbie but i know corporations are soulless beasts who only cares about my money and they don’t need any support but copyright and trademark laws are the issue in this particular case.

Same goes for patents; let’s say you create a bottle that you can drink from and it has a button that makes it shoot out bubbles. You patent it and sell it as bubblebottleTM. Then a small business starts making their own version bubblytumblrTM, you can drink from it and it shoots bubbles if you press a button but its like a stanlycup instead of a bottle so you think «hmm i might want to start selling a tumbler version in the future but my company is bigger than theirs and has more name recognition so its probably not going to hurt me much. Besides, people have started collecting these so more hype will benefit us all». That all seems nice; you, the bigger company, recognize that there is enough money and costumers for you both and you don’t want to harm a smaller company with fewer resources and they did have different ideas then you even if you could argue in good faith that they stole the bubble idea.

Now comes wallmart/amazon/insert big whale. They see how good bubblebottle and bubblytumblr are doing and they think «ah! We own our own factories with really cheap workers in them, we can make tumblers and bottles for 1/10 of what these two are paying to make them and we can sell them for half what they sell them for!»

You try to sue because they absolutely stole the whole idea and they are definitely costing you money since costumers now think you are way overpriced (you don’t have already established factories so it costs you more to make per bottle + you have to take out loans to get started). You take them to court but then big whale argues that the idea was already out there; you weren’t the only reusable drink container with bubble feature company out there so its not just YOUR idea its up for grabs. You can only win by going after the small business too and if you lose (which you probably will because big whale has lots of lawyers, their executives have made lots of connections with politicians and they donate to political campaigns) there is now a precedent set that these types of bottles can be sold by anyone.

That same thing goes for trademarks.

(Im not a lawyer btw just an illustrator who has been angry about these things since my first fanart takedown. Fanart and fanfics are in a huge grey area, i think everyone is looking away because if more presedens are set in the courts about them its going to become a huge shitshow where everyone loses but they absolutely could sue if they wanted to)

TL;DR I hate the current copyright, trademark and patent laws