Eddie's legal team argued that Ugg may not invoke a generic category of boots in the minds of most American consumers. But there is a specific rule in US trademark law for beating the protection of generic words in other languages. The doctrine of foreign equivalence says you cannot trademark the foreign equivalent of a generic term. Eddie didn't have the money to fund his own linguistic survey, so he couldn't refute their evidence. He was making a public case that Australia could and should offer Ugg's a different kind of intellectual property protection.