This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Legal
Vandals bassist come lawyer gets Variety trademark dispute moved closer to home
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 19 April 2011
Hollywood trade mag Variety has failed to stop a trademark dispute from moving to the Californian courts, despite their efforts to have the case heard in Delaware.
Variety is suing punk band The Vandals over a logo they used on their 2004 album ‘Hollywood Potato Chip’ which styled the word ‘Vandals’ so to look like the entertainment industry magazine’s logo, which is trademarked. At the time the magazine’s publisher reached a settlement with the band who agreed not to use the spoof logo ever again. But last year it appeared on both the Vandals website, and the website of their label Kung Fu Records.
Variety exercised a clause in the 2004 agreement that said that if the band were ever found to be in breach they would pay the magazine $50,000 plus legal fees. But the band say they didn’t personally put the logo online last year, so are not in breach of their agreement.
This case is all the more interesting because the band’s bassist, Joe Escalante, is also a lawyer and presents a radio programme about entertainment law, so he is representing the outfit in the dispute. It was he who asked the case be moved to the Californian courts – despite the original agreement naming Delaware as the jurisdiction of choice – because it’s more convenient for him.
Variety did not want the move, but the Delaware courts this week agreed it would make more sense to move the case to California where the majority of documents and witnesses relating to the case are based.
Escalante has since posted on the Vandals website criticising Variety’s lawyers for pursuing this case at all, and seemingly dissing the magazine for ever complaining about his band’s spoofing of their logo which, he reckons, would have been protected by first amendment free speech rights had the magazine’s original legal complaint ever actually reached court.
Variety is yet to respond.
