As you know, Michael Jackson Tribute act “MJ Live” is suing the Michael Jackson Estate regarding their “MJ The Musical” logo.
According to a complaint filed in Nevada federal court, MJ Live has performed over 3,600 shows since opening in Las Vegas during 2012. The producers have spent millions of dollars advertising the tribute show, and more than 2.5 million people have watched it. As a result, attorneys for the tribute show claim that “consumers located in Nevada, throughout the United States, and even the world, have come to associate [the] “MJ LIVE” trademark with … [the] MJ Live show.”
In 2019, seven years after MJ Live started performances, a company affiliated with the estate applied for a trademark to use the “MJ” mark to advertise live performances. “The Application was filed as an ‘intent to use’ application …, meaning that the mark had not yet been used in commerce, but [the company] intended to use it in commerce in the future,” explain the attorneys for the tribute show.
“After requesting and receiving no less than five extensions of time to submit … [documentation] showing actual use of the MJ mark in commerce, on December 19, 2022, [the company] filed its statement of use … identifying its date of first use as ‘10/00/2010.’” The company submitted a photograph of the Broadway marquee from 2022 as evidence, and the application was approved in February 2023.
The attorneys for the tribute show allege that the company affiliated with the estate “made this false representation with the intent of deceiving the [United States Patent and Trademark Office] so that it could obtain a federal trademark registration for the MJ mark.”
In addition to asking the judge to cancel the estate’s trademark registration and declare that the tribute show did not infringe upon it, the attorneys for the MJ Live producers argue that the logo for the Broadway show infringes upon their “protectable common law rights in its MJ Live mark.” Consumers associate the trademark with the tribute show, and the attorneys claim that the estate’s “unauthorized use of [its] confusingly similar MJ … mark in commerce constitutes infringement at common law of [the tribute show’s] MJ Live mark.”
Representatives for the Michael Jackson estate have not responded to the complaint still.
