In 1980, the Häagen-Dazs ice cream company accused a competitor, Frusen Glädjé, of ripping off Häagen-Dazs’s “unique Scandinavian marketing theme.” One of the grounds for the suit was that Frusen Glädjé, like its older competitor, was “a two-word germanic-sounding name having an umlaut (¨) over the letter ‘a.’ ” At first glance that seemed a preposterous claim: A Scandinavian ice cream company stood accused of violating someone else’s copyright on being Scandinavian. Well, there was nothing authentically Scandinavian about Frusen Glädjé, it turned out, except the more or less Swedish-sounding
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