A paint-by-number company told a jury Monday during opening arguments in Texas federal court that arts and crafts corporation Michaels Stores Inc. used the company’s trademarks to create a competing product, saying it only learned of the phony product after a customer called in praising it.
ATC Media LLC, doing business as Masterpiece by Numbers, sued Michaels in 2022 after finding out that the company had released its own paint-by-number kits with the branding Masterpiece Paint by Number printed on its packaging, per ATC media. Paint-by-number kits tell a user how to paint a picture by identifying where different colors go with corresponding numbers.
“This gist of this case is about art, and not about art for art’s sake, but art for profit,” Scott Harper with Harper & Bates LLP, representing ATC Media, told the jury in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.
The paint-by-number company opened up shop in 2017, seeing a desire in the market for higher-end kits. ATC Media’s sales rose rapidly after COVID-19 forced customers to adopt homebound hobbies, Harper said.
