Business Notes LITIGATION

If greeting-card creator Susan Polis Schutz were fashioning a card to mark the event, it might feature a Day-Glo rainbow anchored in a pot of gold. Schutz and her husband Stephen, both 44, won a two-year battle that pitted their small, Boulder-based card company, Blue Mountain Arts, against the giant of the business, Hallmark Cards.

At issue was Hallmark's Personal Touch series, a two-year-old line of 83 cards that feature long, syrupy poems adorned by picturesque natural landscapes. In their $100 million suit, the Schutzes contended that the Hallmark products were rip-offs of cards and posters they had been producing since the early 1970s. In May a U.S. appeals court agreed. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case, and now Hallmark has agreed to stop publishing the Personal Touch cards, buy back existing cards in the line from some 21,000 Hallmark outlets in the U.S. and pay the Schutzes an undisclosed sum. Said Susan: "We got everything we wanted."