Chinatown company caps failed partnership with lawsuit

Perfect Curve, a Chinatown company that sells accessories for maintaining your collection of baseball caps, is suing the owner of a mall chain that sells baseball caps for selling allegedly patent-violating knockoffs.

In its lawsuit, filed yesterday in US District Court in Boston, Perfect Curve said it had long sold cap storage devices and deodorizers to Hat World, Inc. - which owns the Lids stores typically found in malls - without problem. In 2005, the two companies even discussed Hat World buying Perfect Curve. But, negotiations failed and then last year, Hat World stopped buying Perfect Curve products. And then, Perfect Curve charges, Lids began selling similar looking and named products - one of which even came with an instruction booklet identical to the one Perfect Curve distributes.

Perfect Curve says one of the products violates its patent for:

A device for displaying and storing baseball-style caps includes a spine-like support to which one or more individual cap supports can be detachably connected and adjusted as to position. The cap supports can be detachably connected and adjusted without requiring detachment or adjustment in the position of other cap holders on the spine. The cap holders support the cap to avoid the distortion of the shape of the cap.

Perfect Curve seeks a stop to the sale of the products and unspecified treble damages.