Merch Traffic, a subsidiary of Live Nation Entertainment, has filed a trademark lawsuit against a group of anonymous online sellers it accuses of selling counterfeit merchandise for artists including Nirvana, Bruno Mars, The Notorious B.I.G. and more.
The complaint was filed on August 5 in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
It names as defendants a set of e-commerce operators identified only on a “Schedule A” attached to the filing, which the company says use seller aliases to hide their identities.
The company describes itself in the complaint as the exclusive US licensing agent for Avenged Sevenfold, Bruno Mars, Eazy-E, Harry Styles, Nirvana, The Notorious B.I.G. and The Cure.
The Delaware-registered, New York-headquartered business said it filed the action to “combat e-commerce store operators who trade upon the reputation and goodwill of Plaintiff’s Clients and in turn deprive Plaintiff and Plaintiff’s Clients of licensing revenue”.
The suit, which you can read in full here, brings two counts under the Lanham Act: trademark infringement and counterfeiting, and false designation of origin.
Merch Traffic is seeking injunctive relief, an accounting of the sellers’ profits, and up to treble damages for infringement.
In the alternative, it asks for statutory damages of $2,000,000 for each counterfeit trademark, the maximum for willful counterfeiting under US law.
The filing also asks the court to order third-party providers including PayPal, Amazon, eBay, Temu and Walmart to stop displaying the defendants’ listings and advertisements.
On information and belief, the complaint says, the defendants operate from the People’s Republic of China or “other foreign jurisdictions with lax trademark enforcement systems”.
Merch Traffic says the sellers design their stores to “appear to unknowing consumers to be authorized online retailers, outlet stores, or wholesalers”.
Merch Traffic further alleges that such operators “maintain off-shore bank accounts and regularly move funds from their financial accounts to off-shore accounts outside the jurisdiction of this Court to avoid payment of any monetary judgment”.
The complaint cites the OECD in putting global trade in counterfeit and pirated goods at $467 billion, or 2.3% of all imports.
It states that the primary source of those goods is China.
The case is the latest in a wave of anti-counterfeiting litigation across the music business, though it sits on a different front from most recent actions.
Merch Traffic itself filed a trademark suit for Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band in April, and rights holders including HYBE and Universal Music Group‘s merch arm Bravado have brought a run of similar cases this year. But those are tour-venue actions: John Doe suits tied to specific concert dates, seeking orders to seize bootleg merchandise from sellers physically working the venues.
The Springsteen complaint, filed on April 9 in New Jersey federal court, was pegged to a Prudential Center show in Newark; HYBE sued John Doe bootleggers in the same court in July as BTS’s Arirang world tour reached MetLife Stadium; and Bravado targeted counterfeiters at A$AP Rocky’s shows across several districts.
The new Merch Traffic complaint targets the other channel: e-commerce. Rather than street sellers, it goes after online storefronts on marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, Temu and Walmart, using the “Schedule A” model favoured in the Northern District of Illinois, where anonymous overseas sellers are named collectively and hit with asset freezes and platform takedowns.
Marketplaces have themselves become litigation targets: the estate of MF DOOM and the duo Twenty One Pilots both sued Temu last year over counterfeit merch carried on the platform.
Harry Styles, one of the artists named in the new Merch Traffic complaint, brought his own Schedule A suit in the same Chicago federal court in January 2023. That case ended two months later in a combination of default and consent judgments against sellers of unauthorized Styles merchandise — and was handled by the same firm now acting for Merch Traffic, Chicago’s Greer, Burns & Crain.
The defendants have not been publicly identified, and Merch Traffic said it will amend the complaint if the sellers provide “additional credible information regarding their identities”.
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