{"id":4990,"date":"2015-02-19T06:15:09","date_gmt":"2015-02-19T06:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/skylight.gr\/administrator_wordpress\/index.php\/2015\/02\/19\/judge-denies-motion-to-dismiss-in-eagles-singers-suit\/"},"modified":"2015-02-19T06:15:09","modified_gmt":"2015-02-19T06:15:09","slug":"judge-denies-motion-to-dismiss-in-eagles-singers-suit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/2015\/02\/19\/judge-denies-motion-to-dismiss-in-eagles-singers-suit\/","title":{"rendered":"Judge Denies Motion To Dismiss In Eagles Singer&#8217;s Suit"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/f\/f9\/Don_Henley.jpg\/220px-Don_Henley.jpg\" border=\"0\" \/><br \/>Henley, who owns two federal trademark registrations for his name  (Reg. Nos. 2337742 and 2359466), sued Duluth Trading Co. in October 2014  for a variety of claims including violation of his publicity rights and  trademark infringement. According to Henley\u2019s complaint, Duluth Trading  used Henley\u2019s name and the Eagles\u2019 popular song title to imply that  Henley had endorsed the goods and thereby increase sales.  <!--more-->  <\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Duluth filed a motion to dismiss the right-of-publicity claim,  arguing that the advertisement was a humorous play on words achieved by  omitting Henley\u2019s real middle initial, \u201cH,\u201d and substituting it for \u201cA.\u201d  Henley\u2019s attorneys countered that Ninth Circuit precedent does not  extend First Amendment protection to the commercial use of a celebrity\u2019s  name to sell unrelated goods, and that the Ninth Circuit\u2019s  \u201ctransformative use\u201d test set forth in <em>Comedy III Productions Inc. v. Saderup Inc.<\/em>,  25 Cal. 4th 387 (2001) does not apply to commercial speech. Under that  test, the use of a celebrity\u2019s name or likeness is permissible only if  it contains \u201csignificant transformative elements.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Without deciding whether the transformative use test set forth in <em>Comedy III<\/em> applied, the court held that \u201c[e]ven assuming for the sake of argument  that the transformative use test . . . applies, Defendant has not  established that its use of Plaintiff\u2019s name \u2013 and the name of one of  his band\u2019s most famous songs \u2013 in its advertisement was sufficiently  transformative on its face that a motion to dismiss should be granted.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Source: http:\/\/incontestableblog.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Henley, who owns two federal trademark registrations for his name (Reg. Nos. 2337742 and 2359466),&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4990\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skylight.gr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}