Spam-Filtered Email Service Unwinds a $13M Default Judgment–Imagination Products v. Omont

Imagination Products has a supplemental trademark registration in the color orange (Pantone Orange 021c) for hand-operated plumbing snakes. It claims that several defendants, including Omont, sell drain clog cleaning tools that violate its trade dress in the orange shade. This is not a SAD Scheme case, but it is adjacent. The plaintiff sued the Chinese defendant but did not seek an ex parte TRO. It requested, and received, permission to serve the defendant by email. When the defendant no-showed, the court granted a default judgment to the plaintiff and awarded $13M+ damages against Omont. If this had been a SAD Scheme case with a typical ex parte TRO, Omont would have learned of the proceedings, regardless of any attempted service, from the resulting marketplace freeze. Since that didn’t happen, Omont claims it first learned of the lawsuit when the marketplace delisted some of its items in response to the default judgment. The defendant went back into its email account, found the…