In one of the largest judgments ever for trademark infringement, a Los Angeles jury has awarded a Diamond Bar health food supplement company $20 million from a similar company for improper use of its Chinese icons and other slogans.

The jury found that Super Nu-Life Products Inc. of Santa Fe Springs had willfully infringed upon the trademark rights of Super Health Institute Inc. by using its Chinese icons and other slogans.

Super Health Institute, the plaintiff company, formulates and distributes food supplements and vitamins, primarily to Asian-American customers. Defendant Super Nu-Life markets the products produced by Super Health Institute.

Super Nu-Life’s parent company, Goldenrise Development Corp., also of Santa Fe Springs, and its president and vice president were also found jointly and severally liable for intentional infringement.

“The defendant claimed the right to use the combination of the three Chinese characters, saying it is an everyday, generic term used in Chinese,” said plaintiff attorney Art Hasan of the law firm Christie, Parker & Hale. “However, both their language experts and ours testified that it was not the case.”

The three characters in question which are pronounced “chao jian kang” and roughly translate to “super health” appear on all of Super Health Institute’s sales and promotional materials and on its products’ labels.

Mark Partridge, a trademark law professor at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, said the $20 million verdict is unusually large for a trademark case. He said the largest such case, decided in 1992, involved a $25 million judgment.

While the L.A. case focused on trademark issues, a lawyer for the defendant said it is better described as a contract dispute case. In April 1995, the plaintiff signed a contract for the defendant to use its icons to sell its health products in mainland China and from an outlet in Rosemead.

The company filed the suit claiming that Super Nu-Life overstepped that contract by using the icons in the U.S. market, and that it even attempted to register the Chinese characters as its own trademark. (The mark was not formally registered but had been used by Super Health for more than a decade, which qualifies it for trademark protection.)

The relationship between the two companies deteriorated after about a year, leading to the litigation, according to Douglas Morseburg, an attorney at Sheldon & Mak who represented the defendant.

“It isn’t a case where you have one company knock off copies of the other’s products,” Morseburg said. “They had had an agreement and the dispute is over differing interpretations of it.”

Morseburg said he will file a motion with the court claiming that the $20 million judgment is excessive, and if that fails they may file an appeal.

He said the relationship between the two companies became problematic because of differing interpretations of whether Super Nu-Life was allowed to expand the areas where it could market Super Health Institute’s products. Super Nu-Life believed the contract also allowed it to develop markets in new territories, Morseburg said.

He explained that his clients are from China while the plaintiffs are from Japan and Korea, and that their contract was written in far-from-perfect English.

“The fact of who drew up the contract, with its ambiguous language, has not been resolved,” Morseburg said. “They interpreted differently.”

Morseburg said his clients began to develop new markets in areas of New York where mainland China visitors are known to congregate, and Super Health Institute became protective of what it considered its own territory, and retaliated with trademark litigation.

The case was heard in the United States District Court in Los Angeles.

Super Nu-Life had filed a counterclaim against Super Health Institute, alleging violations of antitrust laws. The counterclaim alleged that Super Health Institute tried to coerce Super Nu-Life to set its prices at a certain level. Super Nu-Life’s refusal to set its prices at those levels added to the friction that led to the suit, Morseburg said.

The counterclaim was dismissed because of insufficient evidence.