Obviously, we want the cool stuff we see in movies. Owning the same car, or phone, or sunglasses as the movie heroes we admire helps us imagine ourselves a bit further into the escape that movies provide, confers some of their excitement and sophistication. I’m sure the only reason the world isn’t more full of Aston Martins is that the company refused to cater to baby boomers like me by including machine guns, ejector seats and rotating license plates in the rally sport package.

But a lawsuit now being brought by the studio behind the vampire hit “Twilight” movies against an apparel manufacturer is testing how careful a brand has to be in capitalizing on movie popularity—and might break new ground on what producers can ask for as remedy for infringement.

The facts, as pieced together from such legal journals as EW.com and The Hollywood Reporter, are these. Apparently Bella, the heroine of the first “Twilight” movie released in 2008—hereinafter referred to as “Twilight”—was supposed to be wearing a brown hoodie in filming the key forest scene where the vampire Edward reveals his secret undead life to her. But when director Catherine Hardwicke saw the brown jacket on the brunette actress, she asked for something in a different color for contrast.

The costume designer ran out to a local Nordstrom Rack outlet store and bought a $46 blue hooded canvas jacket from manufacturer BB Dakota. The last-minute changeup reportedly created a huge demand among tweenage girls, and the jacket, originally introduced in 2006, was put back into production that year as the “Bella Twilight” jacket ($70.)

A review on MTV’s Web site said buying the blue jacket “brings you this much closer to Robert Pattison”, the actor who plays the hunky lead vampire. Another style site, SoJones.com, termed it “vampirelicious”.

The jacket also featured in promotional art from the movie studio and became something of a signature look for the Bella character, who also figured large in the 2009 “New Moon” sequel and in “Eclipse”, set to open nationwide later this week.

All this with no formal product placement arrangements between the makers of jacket and movie.

But earlier this month Summit Entertainment brought suit against BB Dakota for copyright and trademark infringement. And as a remedy for that, the company asks for an end to the sale of the offending item.

And then for more: Summit also asks a judge to turn over all profits BB Dakota has made from the sale of the jacket.

And still more: Summit wants the remaining inventory of Dakota’s Bella Twilight jackets to be handed over.

That’s a serious bite.

The facts of the suit and the case are still a bit under-reported. Neither Summit nor BB Dakota have responded to requests for clarification, and I haven’t seen a copy of the lawsuit. Nor is it clear the extent to which BB Dakota traded on its accidental inclusion in the hit movie. The jacket is mow marketed on its Web site as the “Nicola”, although the merchandising copy says, “Bella Swann wears this jacket in Twilight and scores the hottest vampire in high school, and so can you!” But an earlier version of the coat is available on Amazon.com as the “BB Dakota Bella Swan Twilight Hoodie Jacket”

And one commenter to a blog post about the case by Jacqueline Lipton, a professor at Case Western Reserve School of Law and co-director of the Center for Law, Technology and the Arts, points out that in versions sold after the first movie, Dakota actually included garment labels using the “Bella” and “Twilight” names. If true, that would make the link to the property part of the manufacturing process and not just a matter of “As Seen on TV” associative advertising.

Still, as Lipton points out, it’s a problematic case of infringement. After all, the jacket pre-dated the movie, and its inclusion was mere happenstance. If the costume designer had looked right rather than left in that Nordstrom Rack, Bella might have been wearing someone else’s blue jacket.

There is an allowance for “fair use” of trademarked terms under some circumstances, one of which is that the user does nothing to suggest sponsorship by the trademark holder. (For you legal trivia fans, the case that gave rise to this judgment was Playboy v. Welles, in which it was found that a former Playmate of the Year was allowed to use terms trademarked by Playboy in both copy and tags on her commercial Web site.)

One commenter on a Reuters article about the suit said, “BB Dakota should sue Summit for using their IP (the jacket) in the movie without permission…An injunction against Summit barring further distribution of the movie with the scenes containing the jacket sounds appropriate.”

As a commenter on a Techdirt account of the case said, “If a series comes out called ‘Evening,’ can we no longer sell evening gowns?”

And then there’s the question of how Summit wants to be compensated for the alleged infringement. Even if trademark and/or copyright were violated, the usual cures would be more along the lines of issuing a disclaimer of affiliation with the movie and ceasing to use the name in marketing and merchandising. But asked for an account of all the profit BB Dakota has made on the item—since 2008, remember, meaning they wouldn’t have to include the money they made on the item pre-“Twilight”—and for the transfer of all remaining merchandise seems, as Lipton puts it in an e-mail, “over-reaching.”

In a broader sense, shouldn’t BB Dakota be able to profit fairly from its fairly accidental association with a powerful hit series? Putting aside that issue of the garment labels, that is, since that would seem to imply an official link to the production. But the jacket was in the movie, and the movie was a hit ($1 billion grosses worldwide so far for the first two in the series), and several hundred thousand teenage girls want that jacket more as a result. Why is Dakota precluded from capitalizing on that windfall? Or is that benefit reserved only for brands that can afford to pay for placement and pony up additional millions for co-branded ad campaigns?