Lawsuit Accusing Boy Scouts of Muddling the Girl Scouts Brand Is Dismissed

A federal decide on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit by which the Woman Scouts had claimed that the Boy Scouts had created branding confusion and broken its recruitment efforts through the use of phrases like “scouts” and “scouting” in its personal advertising supplies.

Choose Alvin Okay. Hellerstein of the U.S. District Courtroom in Manhattan dominated that the Boy Scouts of America might describe its actions as “scouting” irrespective of gender and that “there aren’t any points to be tried.”

“The Boy Scouts adopted the scout phrases to explain precisely the student nature of programming, to not confuse or exploit Woman Scouts’ status,” Choose Hellerstein wrote in his ruling.

“Such branding is in line with the scout-formative branding Boy Scouts has used for a century, together with in its coed packages which have existed for the reason that Seventies,” he wrote.

He wrote that the time period “scout” described each the Boy Scouts’ and Woman Scouts’ programming.

“The Boy Scouts’ choice to turn into coed, even when it impacts Woman Scouts’ operations, doesn’t show dangerous religion,” the decide stated, including that “an affordable jury couldn’t conclude that the adoption of the Scout Phrases was in dangerous religion.”

Choose Hellerstein concluded by calling for the dismissal of the swimsuit, which he described as “critical, contentious and costly” litigation.

In an announcement on Thursday, the Woman Scouts stated that it was “deeply dissatisfied” with the decide’s choice and that it deliberate to attraction.

“This case is about guaranteeing that folks should not misled into considering that Woman Scouts are a part of or the identical because the Boy Scouts,” the group added.

In an announcement, the Boy Scouts of America stated it was “happy that the courtroom has vindicated the B.S.A.’s place and summarily rejected” the Woman Scouts’ claims.

The lawsuit, which was filed in 2018, was one of many current authorized and public-relations skirmishes between the 2 organizations.

The lawsuit got here a yr after the Boy Scouts’ announcement that it might broadly settle for ladies into its packages. The Boy Scouts stated that after years of listening to from households who needed the choice of character-development and management packages run by the group, it determined to simply accept ladies.

A submitting in federal courtroom in 2020 additionally accused the Boy Scouts of participating in unfair competitors and trademark infringement. The group cited the Boy Scouts’ “Scout Me In” recruiting marketing campaign, which featured ladies in ads.

Of their advertising, some native Boy Scouts teams included the phrase “Woman Scouting,” which additional infringed on longstanding logos granted to the Woman Scouts by Congress, the submitting stated. The Woman Scouts known as the overtures “extremely damaging.”

The Boy Scouts group, which was included in 1910, started to simply accept ladies because it noticed its membership decline in current a long time. In 2017, the group stated that it had 2.3 million members ages 7 to 21 and practically one million volunteers all through the USA and its territories.

At its peak within the Seventies, the group had an estimated 5 million members.

In 2020, the Boy Scouts of America filed for chapter safety. The three-week trial in Delaware over the Boy Scouts’ plan to reorganize in chapter has entered closing arguments. At stake is approval of the group’s plan to compensate tens of hundreds of males who say they had been sexually abused whereas they had been boy scouts.