Dame Dash and Kanye West just won a trademark infringement lawsuit brought against them over their music video/film Loisaidas.
Remember that Loisaidas thing Dame Dash was promoting all over social media last year? You know, the thing that Kanye West was involved in that was a supposed to be a mini-series about a turf war on New York City’s Lower East Side?
Here is a reminder.
So, it came out. But the lawsuit that followed the film made more headlines. Both Dash and West were sued by a man named Michael Medina who is a member of a band named Loisaidas. No, we never heard of them either.
But Medina, who owns the trademark for the word, insisted that Dash and West stole the name from his band and made a “music video” where the name was used in the titles and said throughout. Dash defended that the work was not a music video but that it’s actually a film.
Fast forward to this week, a New York federal judge ruled that Medina’s claims were about as strong as wet toilet tissue and threw the case out.
The Hollywood Reporter reports:
U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest dismisses the complaint by applying the “Rogers test,” which emanates from an 1989 appellate decision over Federico Fellini’s 1986 film Ginger and Fred. To adhere to First Amendment values, judges in cases like these are to examine whether use of the mark has artistic relevance, and if it does, whether the work in question is explicitly misleading. Here, she applies the “Rogers test” at the very early motion to dismiss phase which addresses whether a plausible claim has been pled rather than a potential later phase testing factual allegations.
The judge says the Loisaidas film title “clearly has artistic relevance” and that Medina’s complaint “is devoid of concrete allegations that defendants attempted to suggest that plaintiff’s duo produced the work; to the contrary, as evidenced by Exhibit D to the operative complaint, materials promoting the film prominently informed the reader that it was ‘Executive Produced: Dame Dash & Kanye West.’”
Medina “is entitled to protect his duo’s trademark, but not by staking his claim to a pre-existing term and then attempting to remove all expressive, non-explicitly-misleading uses from public circulation,” Forrest writes.
We’re guessing that Medina doesn’t follow Kanye on Twitter, or else he would’ve heeded to his warning to the world.
