The founder of the popular Reddit forum WallStreetBets is suing the social media company, alleging he was unfairly banned as moderator of the group and blocked in his efforts to gain a trademark.
Jaime Rogozinski is asking that a court grant him ownership of the WallStreetBets trademark, according to a lawsuit filed February 15 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. He also is asking that Reddit be barred from using the WallStreetBets brand unless he is reinstated to the forum.
Rogozinski’s saga, as portrayed by the the lawsuit, paints the picture of a scrappy individual investor who sought to help others tap Wall Street advice following the Great Recession, only to be jilted by a large tech company. After WallStreetBets grew into a forum with more than 1 million subscribers, Rogozinski learned his account was suspended in April 2020 — shortly after he had filed an application to register WallStreetBets as a trademark, the lawsuit claims.
Reddit informed Rogozinski that his account was suspended for violating company policy by “attempting to monetize a community,” the lawsuit noted. The lawsuit alleges that “people use Reddit to market and sell everything from investment advice to bodily fluids.”
“Rogzinski’s true offense was trying to control the brand he created in the first place, a famous brand that helped Reddit ride to a $10 billion valuation,” the suit claims. It also added that “Reddit’s dreams … turned out to be Mr. Rogozinski’s nightmare as the company insists, ‘if you build it, we will take it from you’.”
Jaime Rogozinski, founder of Reddit forum WallStreetBets, speaks during the CoinDesk 2022 Consensus Festival in Austin, Texas, on June 11, 2022.
Bloomberg
In a statement to CBS MoneyWatch, Reddit described the lawsuit as “completely frivolous.”
“Jaime was removed as a moderator of r/WallStreetBets by Reddit and banned by the community moderators for attempting to enrich himself,” the company said.
The company added, “This lawsuit is another transparent attempt to enrich himself. It’s telling that he is filing this suit three years after he was banned by r/WallStreetBets and long after the community rose in mainstream popularity without his involvement.”
Although Reddit removed Rogzinski as a moderator, the company allowed him to continue using the social media platform, a spokesperson added.
Trademark fight
In March 2020, Rogozinski filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to register WallStreetBets for use with online and print publications about trading and finance, for clothing items, and to provide an online forum for financial and trading information, according to his suit.
In May of that year, however, Reddit filed the first of four trademark applications to the U.S. Patent office to register WallStreetBets as a trademark. Reddit has also started legal action to block Rogozinski from asserting ownership of WallStreetBets, the suit said.
“This case is about putting a stop to Reddit’s systematic theft holding the company accountable for its misconduct,” the lawsuit alleges.
WallStreetBets emerged as a meeting place for small investors during the pandemic — after Rogozinski had been banned from the site — propelling the stocks of companies like AMC Entertainment, GameStop and others into the stratosphere for a time. But the subreddit’s brand is one of the better known sections of Reddit, which could prove to be a valuable asset for whomever controls the trademark.
Among his lawsuit’s goals — that the court will declare that “he, and not Reddit, is the owner of the WallStreetBets trademark.” He also wants the court to order Reddit to stop using the WallStreetBets name “unless and until the company reinstates Mr. Rogozinski as the senior-most moderator of the r/WallStreetBets subreddit.”
FILE: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton talks to reporters after the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Title 42 case, Apr. 26, 2022 in Washington, D.C.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has agreed to apologize and pay $3.3 million in taxpayer money to four former staffers who accused him of corruption in 2020, igniting an ongoing FBI investigation of the three-term Republican.
Under terms of a preliminary lawsuit settlement filed Friday, Paxton made no admission of wrongdoing to accusations of bribery and abuse of office, which he has denied for years and called politically motivated.
But Paxton did commit to making a remarkable public apology toward some of his formerly trusted advisers whom he fired or forced out after they reported him to the FBI. He called them “rogue employees” after they accused Paxton of misusing his office to help one of his campaign contributors, who also employed a woman with whom the attorney general acknowledged having an extramarital affair.
The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday.
Both sides signed a mediated agreement that was filed in the Texas Supreme Court and will be followed by a longer, formalized settlement.
“Attorney General Ken Paxton accepts that plaintiffs acted in a manner that they thought was right and apologizes for referring to them as ‘rogue employees,’” the final settlement must state, according to court records.
In all, eight members of Paxton’s senior staff joined in the extraordinary revolt in 2020 and either resigned or were fired. The settlement is with four of them who sued under Texas’ whistleblower law.
The payout would not come from Paxton’s own pocket but from state funds, which means it would still require approval by the GOP-controlled Texas Legislature.
Settlement of the case, which Paxton’s office fought in court for years, means he will avoid sitting for a civil deposition at a time when a corruption investigation by federal agents and prosecutors remains open. In turn, the attorney general’s office agreed to remove an October 2020 news release from its website that decries Paxton’s accusers and to issue the statement of contrition to former staffers David Maxwell, Ryan Vassar, Mark Penley and James Blake Brickman.
The settlement also prevents Paxton from seeking the withdrawal of a 2021 appeals court ruling that state whistleblower law applies to the attorney general.
The agreement does not include any provisions limiting the ability of Paxton’s accusers to make public statements or cooperate with federal investigators.
The deal comes more than two years after Paxton’s staff accused him of misusing his office to help Austin real estate developer Nate Paul, whose business was also under federal investigation. The allegations centered on Paxton hiring an outside lawyer to investigate Paul’s claims of misconduct by the FBI.
Paxton and Paul have broadly denied wrongdoing and neither has been charged with a federal crime.
In the wake of the revolt, an Associated Press investigation in September found that Paxton’s agency has come unmoored, with seasoned lawyers quitting over practices they say slant legal work, reward loyalists and drum out dissent.
But the investigation, accusations and a separate 2015 securities fraud indictment for which Paxton has yet to face trial have done little to hurt him politically. He easily defeated challenger George P. Bush in a contested GOP primary last spring, went on to decisively beat his Democratic opponent and secure a third term in November and has filed a steady stream of legal challenges to the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden.
While swearing in Paxton to another four years on the job last month, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott described it as an easy call during the midterm elections to keep backing him.
“I supported Ken Paxton because I thought the way he was running the attorney general’s office was the right way to run the attorney general’s office,” said Abbott.
Several former National Football League players have flied a class-action lawsuit against the league’s benefits plan, its board of trustees and Commissioner Roger Goodell in federal court Thursday, alleging that the board and the benefits plan wrongfully denied benefits to former players.
The plaintiffs include Willis McGahee, Eric Smith, Jason Alford, Daniel Loper, Michael McKenzie, Jamize Olawale, Alex Parsons, Charles Sims, Joey Thomas and Lance Zeno.
The lawsuit claims that “repeated lies; material misrepresentations; active concealment; flagrant violations of” relevant statues, regulations and case law and “illogical interpretations of the terms” of the benefits plan and “reliance on conflicted advisors” have “resulted in a pattern of systemic bias” against disabled NFL players.
“Plaintiffs seek to pull back the curtain on behalf of all similarly situated former NFL Players, bringing many relevant factual and legal issues concerning the Plan to light,” the group said in the lawsuit.
The plaintiffs said that the board’s behavior was “motivated by financial considerations to limit the payment of benefits” from the plan.
The plaintiffs are represented by several legal teams, including lawyer Chris Seeger, who led the NFL concussion settlement, which in 2016 won $1 billion for former players. The lawsuit seeks to recover benefits that the players claim they are owed, and prohibit further violations of the terms of the plans.
The players also said that the board acted hostile and used other “unscrupulous tactics” to deny claims. They also alleged that the benefits plan decisions were made by doctors who had an interest in denying benefits: Instead of being “neutral physicians,” the doctors are “selected and paid by the Board,” which does not make an effort to collect statistics and ensure that the physicians are “indeed neutral and unbiased.”
The complaint also alleged that the board has failed to review all relevant material for claims and instead supported the conclusions of its physicians. This pattern, the players said, shows a pattern of the board repeatedly breaching its fiduciary duty to players.
In a press conference on Thursday morning, Samuel Katz, an attorney who specializes in disability law and who has represented NFL players in other lawsuits, said that data showed one board-paid neuropsychologist earned $820,000 in direct and indirect compensation. In a statistical sample of 29 benefit conclusions, the neuropsychologist denied all 29 claims, the lawsuit says.
Charts included in the lawsuit appear to show that in many cases, physicians who denied more claims received more compensation from the board.
In a statement, the NFL said that the benefits plan “annually provides more than $330 million to deserving players and their families.”
“The NFL-NFLPA disability plan is fair and administered by a professional staff overseen by a board comprised of an equal number of appointees of the NFL Players Association and the league, which includes retired players,” the league said. “This board reviews the activities of the office and operation of the benefit program, including every contested application for benefits to ensure that retired players who are entitled to disability benefits receive them as intended.”
In a press conference on Thursday morning, several players spoke candidly about what the lack of disability benefits meant to them. Eric Smith, a former New York Jets player who also spent some time coaching in the NFL, said that “day to day, every day” he is “in pain” and needs a shoulder replacement at 39 years old.
Smith said that when he traveled from New Jersey to North Carolina to be examined by a benefits plan physician after consulting with his own doctor, his appointment took just “five minutes.” According to the lawsuit, he was denied benefits in 2013 by a doctor who was found to have a 100% denial rate in a sample. He appealed the case in 2014, but the appeal was denied.
“It’s just frustrating. You think about all we did for them, all the injuries we played through. You lay your body on the line for them, trying to make your team the best you can … and once you’re done, it’s ‘Here’s our disability plan. We’ll take care of you. Here’s your five years of insurance, you’ll be fine after that,’” Smith said. “It’s a sham.”
In 2015, the suit alleges Smith was examined again, by a doctor who was paid just over $34,000 by the board. He was approved for some benefits. The next year, that doctor’s compensation fell to just over $16,700, the suit says. When Smith applied for further benefits, he was seen by multiple doctors, all of whom were paid highly by the board, and those further benefits were denied, the lawsuit claims.
Willis McGahee, a former NFL runningback who played for three teams during his 11-year professional career, said that he also struggles with pain and emotional turmoil related to the lack of care, saying that some days it is “hard to get out of bed.” He said in the press conference that he has had 15 surgeries, and his own doctors have told him that his body “looks like an 80 year old man” because of the arthritis and joint injuries he has suffered.
In 2016, he said he was denied disability benefits by the board. In a sample looking at 33 examinations conducted by the neurologist who examined McGahee, the doctor said that in none of those cases did he find a player eligible for benefits, according to the lawsuit. McGahee was also seen by a neuropsychologist, who according to a sample, has an 87.5% denial rate, the suit says. A 2020 appeal by McGahee was also denied. The doctors who examined him then also were sampled, and in those samples they were found to never approve a player for benefits, the lawsuit claims.
“It’s time for me to step up. It’s time for other players to step up and say something,” McGahee said. “We’re not just going to sit back and just let it all fall down on us and take the beating. I did it for five years. It got me nowhere. It’s time to open my mouth to say something.”
Even before the recent Taylor Swift ticket snafu, Ticketmaster and its parent company, the concert promoter Live Nation Entertainment, have been criticized for controlling 70% of the big concert ticket market, leaving fans and artists nowhere else to go. Live Nation is now being investigated by the Justice Department, and last month was called to testify before a Senate anti-trust subcommittee. Correspondent Rita Braver talks with Sen. Amy Klobuchar; with an attorney who has filed a lawsuit against Ticketmaster; and with disappointed Swifties – fans of the pop star who can’t “shake it off.”
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On Friday, Trump and lawyer Alina Habba sent a letter to U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks. They offered to post a $1.03 million bond in order to appeal the order sanctioning the pair $937,989, for filing a conspiracy suit against Clinton and others, Bloomberg reported.
Middlebrooks last month blasted the lawsuit as completely without legal merit, and said it amounted to nothing more than a partisan political manifesto that wasted taxpayer money and time for legitimate court actions.
He accused the former president of a “pattern of abuse of the courts” for filing a number of such suits for political purposes, which Middlebrooks said “undermines the rule of law” and “amounts to obstruction of justice.”
He added: “We are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose.”
Middlebrooks raked Trump as “a mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process,” who uses the courts “to seek revenge on political adversaries.”
Middlebrooks imposed the sanctions on behalf of 18 defendants who submitted a joint motion accusing Trump of knowingly filing a suit with bogus claims to dishonestly advance a political narrative.
As of Saturday, Middlebrooks had not issued a decision on Trump and Habba’s posted bond offer.
A jury has decided Elon Musk didn’t deceive investors with tweets in 2018.
The verdict by the nine jurors was reached after less that two hours of deliberation following a three-week trial.
The trial pitted Tesla investors represented in a class-action lawsuit against Musk, who is CEO of both the electric automaker and the Twitter service he bought for for $44 billion a few months ago.
In 2018, Musk tweeted that he had the financing to take Tesla private even though it turned out he hadn’t gotten an iron-clad commitment for an aborted deal that would have cost $20 billion to $70 billion to pull off.
It’s a major vindication for Musk, whose integrity was at stake as well part of a fortune that has established him as one of the world’s richest people. He could have been saddled with a bill for billions of dollars in damages had the jury found him liable for the 2018 tweets that had already been deemed falsehoods by the judge presiding over the trial.
After three hours of arguments wrapped up Friday, a nine-person jury began its deliberations in the civil case centered on two tweets Musk posted Aug. 7, 2018 about a Tesla buyout that never happened.
The first tweet, posted just before he boarded his private jet, Musk declared he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private. A few hours later, Musk sent another tweet indicating that the deal was imminent.
The tweets caused Twitter’s stock to surge during a 10-day period covered by the lawsuit before falling back after Musk abandoned a deal in which he never had a firm financing commitment, based on evidence presented during the three-week trial.
During roughly eight hours on the stand earlier in the trial, Musk insisted he believed he had lined up the funds from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund to take Tesla private after eight years as a publicly held company. He defended his initial August 2018 tweet as well-intentioned and aimed at ensuring all Tesla investors knew the automaker might be on its way to ending its run as a publicly held company.
“I had no ill motive,” Musk testified. “My intent was to do the right thing for all shareholders.”
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Former President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit Monday against journalist Bob Woodward, claiming he never had permission to publicly release interview recordings made for the book “Rage.”
The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Pensacola, Florida, against Woodward, his publisher Simon & Schuster Inc., and the publisher’s parent company Paramount Global. Trump’s attorneys are seeking nearly $50 million in damages.
FILE: Bob Woodward speaks during the Robert A. Caro symposium at New-York Historical Society on Oct. 24, 2021, New York City.
Taylor Hill / Getty Images
Simon & Schuster and Woodward released a joint response saying Trump’s lawsuit is without merit, and they will aggressively defend against it.
“All these interviews were on the record and recorded with President Trump’s knowledge and agreement,” the statement said. “Moreover, it is in the public interest to have this historical record in Trump’s own words. We are confident that the facts and the law are in our favor.”
The lawsuit claims that Trump consented to being recorded for a series of interviews between December 2019 and August 2020, but only for a book Woodward was working on. “Rage” was published in September 2021. Trump claims Woodward and Simon & Schuster Inc. violated his copyright by releasing the audio recordings in November 2022 as “The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump.”
The copyright lawsuit comes just weeks after a federal judge in West Palm Beach sanctioned Trump and one of his attorneys, ordering them to pay nearly $1 million for filing what the judge said was a bogus lawsuit against Trump’s 2016 rival Hillary Clinton and others.
U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks accused Trump in a Jan. 19 filing of a “pattern of abuse of the courts” for filing frivolous lawsuits for political purposes, which he said “undermines the rule of law” and “amounts to obstruction of justice.”
Citing Trump’s recent legal action against the Pulitzer Prize board, the New York attorney general, big tech companies and CNN, Middlebrooks described Trump as “a prolific and sophisticated litigant” who uses the courts “to seek revenge on political adversaries.”
Simon & Schuster is owned by CBS’s parent company Paramount Global.
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On Friday, Elon Musk appeared on the witness stand in federal court in San Francisco, testifying in a trial brought by Tesla investors. They say Musk’s tweets in 2018 may have crashed the stock price of Tesla, leaving shareholders holding the bag. Musk told the jury, “Just because I tweet something does not mean people believe it …” Correspondent John Blackstone has the story.
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A federal lawsuit in Nevada is seeking class-action damages for countless hotel patrons who booked rooms in Las Vegas since 2019, alleging that most hotel-casinos on the Las Vegas Strip have used a third-party vendor to illegally fix prices.
The complaint filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas, alleges that casino giants MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment, along with Treasure Island and Wynn Resorts, share information with a company that used pricing algorithms to “maximize market-wide prices.”
It accuses the resorts and Rainmaker Group Unlimited, a revenue management company owned by Cendyn Group, of “algorithmic-driven price-fixing … at the expense of consumers and in violation of antitrust laws.”
The Associated Press sent an email to Rainmaker seeking comment. Michael Bennett, a representative of Boca Raton, Florida-based Cendyn, declined to comment.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of plaintiffs Richard Gibson and Heriberto Valiente by attorneys from the law firm of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro in Seattle and Berkeley, California.
The suit seeks class status and unspecified monetary damages for “tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands” of people based on alleged antitrust violations of the federal Sherman Act.
MGM Resorts, which operates properties including Bellagio, New York-New York, MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay, responded Thursday with a statement calling the lawsuit “meritless.”
“The claims against MGM Resorts are factually inaccurate, and we intend to defend ourselves vigorously,” it said.
Wynn Resorts declined to comment. The Associated Press left messages seeking comment from representatives of Treasure Island and Caesars Entertainment.
Caesars Entertainment operates Las Vegas Strip properties including Caesars Palace, Harrah’s, the Horseshoe, Paris Las Vegas and the Flamingo.
In a statement, plaintiffs’ attorney Steve Berman invoked and reshaped a ubiquitous advertising campaign tagline introduced in early 2003.
“What happens in Vegas will no longer stay in Vegas,” Berman said. “We intend to expose the under-the-table deals perpetrated by these Vegas hotels.”
Algorithm to “maximize pricing”
Alan Feldman, a longtime MGM Resorts executive who is now a fellow at the International Gaming Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said hotels, airlines and car rental companies monitor costs and prices throughout what he termed “the travel ecosystem.”
“Rest assured, they watch each other,” Feldman said. “Then they can decide if they want to go above it, below it, or just ignore it.”
“But I can’t imagine these companies talking to one another,” he said, “and certainly not on price.”
The lawsuit points to concerns about algorithmic pricing identified in a 2017 speech by Maureen Ohlhausen, a former acting chairperson of the Federal Trade Commission.
Ohlhausen defined a computer algorithm as a set of rules or instructions that can model thousands of “extremely complex and nuanced behaviors” in a fraction of a second “and react almost instantaneously to changes.”
She said companies provide their pricing data to “a common, outside agent” that uses the information to program its algorithm “to maximize industrywide pricing.”
“We even have an old-fashioned term for it,” Ohlhausen said, “the hub-and-spoke conspiracy.”
“In effect, the firms themselves don’t directly share their pricing strategies,” she said, “but that information still ends up in common hands, and that shared information is then used to maximize market-wide prices.”
The court filing said two former Rainmaker employees told attorneys the company’s products are used by 90% or “just about every” property on the resort-lined Las Vegas Strip. The lawsuit didn’t identify the former employees.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that average daily room rates for Strip resorts hit record highs in 2022, topping $200 a night in October during a busy convention month.
For the year through November, the average rate was $170.45, the highest in history, and did not include add-on resort fees or account for complimentary rooms provided to high-rollers, the newspaper said.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is urging millions of veterans exposed to burn pits to file claims with the department after the PACT Act expanded health coverage. Norah O’Donnell sat down with VA Secretary Denis McDonough to see how the department is handling the largest health care expansion for veterans in decades.
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A federal grand jury in Los Angeles is gathering evidence in a criminal investigation of Goodyear recreational vehicle tires that the government blames for crashes that killed eight people and injured dozens of others.
The grand jury has subpoenaed Arizona lawyer David Kurtz seeking all documents and deposition transcripts in a lawsuit he filed against the Akron, Ohio, tire maker.
A letter accompanying the Jan. 4 subpoena says it was issued in an “official criminal investigation being conducted by the Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General.” It also says the Justice Department’s Consumer Protection Branch in Washington is involved, as well as the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles.
Documents from Kurtz’s lawsuit touched off a 2017 investigation of the tires by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that resulted in a recall last year. The documents also revealed Goodyear knew the G159 RV tire could fail and cause severe crashes, yet it didn’t recall them for as many as 20 years.
The Justice Department and the DOT Inspector General wouldn’t comment on the probe.
In a statement, Goodyear didn’t address the federal investigation, but maintained there’s no safety defect with the tires. The company said it recalled the tires to address risks that happen when they are underinflated or overloaded.
“This tire hasn’t been made since 2003,” the statement said, adding that “it consistently met Goodyear’s demanding safety standards.”
Kurtz confirmed that he received the subpoena and provided copies of it and the accompanying letter. He said Thursday he intends to comply and produce about 200,000 documents he gathered from suing Goodyear.
The DOT Inspector General says on its website its agents have federal law enforcement authority to conduct criminal investigations, including the ability to make arrests, execute search warrants and carry firearms. “Where appropriate, we make referrals for prosecution to the Department of Justice or state and local prosecuting authorities,” the office said in a statement.
Loss of control
It’s not clear exactly what the grand jury is investigating. But in a letter to Goodyear seeking the recall last year, NHTSA said the company should have recalled the tires within five working days of becoming aware of a defect, which it apparently knew of as early as 2002.
“The safety-related defect is a clear, identified failure that leads to a loss of vehicle control, causing crashes and potentially catastrophic consequences such as death and serious injury,” NHTSA wrote in the letter.
Documents from the safety agency say the tire tread can separate from the body, causing drivers to lose control and increasing the risk of a crash.
Goodyear wouldn’t recall the tires even as late as March of last year, despite investigators finding that their failure caused crashes that killed eight people and injured 69 others from 1998 through 2009.
NHTSA made the allegations against Goodyear in a February 2022 letter sent to the company seeking a recall of 22.5-inch-diameter G159 tires.
Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. responded to the agency in a March 8 letter refusing to do a recall, but later it decided to conduct one, according to NHTSA documents.
NHTSA had threatened a public hearing and court action if the tires weren’t recalled. Goodyear then agreed to recall about 173,000 tires.
In its response letter, Goodyear maintained that the tires were rigorously tested and fully qualified to operate at highway speeds. “No subject tire inspected by Goodyear engineers ever revealed or even suggested a defect of any kind,” the company wrote.
“Extraordinary failure rate”
NHTSA presented a detailed timeline of what Goodyear knew when, based on an investigation into the tires that began in 2017. It also said the company routinely settled lawsuits and got judges to seal the information, keeping it from NHTSA and other plaintiffs’ lawyers.
“NHTSA was not alerted to the extraordinary failure rate of the subject tires” until documents were released in an Arizona case in 2017, the letter said.
After the recall was announced, NHTSA, which is part of the Transportation Department, said it was closing its investigation but reserved the right to take further action as warranted.
Goodyear has said few if any of the tires are still in use. As of Jan. 13, the company had replaced only 13 of the tires, according to NHTSA documents.
News of the investigation was reported Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal.
Kurtz said he’s happy that the government seems to be moving on the investigation.
Twenty GOP-led states have filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration over a new immigration policy that would allow up to 30,000 migrants from four countries to enter the U.S. legally each month if they have American sponsors. CBS News immigration reporter Camilo Montoya-Galvez discusses the lawsuit and what it could mean for the Biden administration’s proposals.
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Lawyers for the 5-year-old son of a man who died after repeatedly being shocked by Los Angeles police with a stun gun following a traffic collision filed a $50 million claim Friday for damages against the city.
The legal claim is required before Keenan Anderson‘s son and estate can sue LA police for wrongful death and civil rights violations for restraining him and shocking him six times with a Taser in less than a minute on Jan. 3.
“If you Taser someone with 50,000 watts of electrical energy six times … is there really any wonder that moments later his heart will begin to flutter?” attorney Carl Douglas said at a news conference. “Is there any wonder why four hours later his heart could no longer withstand the pressure from that Taser and gave up, leaving a 5-year-old boy in his wake?”
The claim was filed on behalf of Anderson’s son, Syncere Kai Anderson, who stood with his mother, Gabrielle Hansell, the administrator of his estate, alongside their attorneys.
Pictures of 31-year-old teacher, Keenan Anderson, who was tasered multiple times during a struggle with LAPD officers in Venice and died at a hospital, are displayed at news conference to announce filing a $50 million in damages claim against the city of Los Angeles over his death in Los Angeles Friday, Jan. 20, 2023.
Damian Dovarganes / AP
Anderson, 31, a high school English teacher in Washington, D.C., and cousin of Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, was the suspect in a hit-and-run traffic collision when he was stopped by police in Venice. He later ran from officers and resisted arrest, police said.
Anderson screamed for help after he was pinned to the street by officers and repeatedly shocked, according to video released by the department.
“They’re trying to kill me,” Anderson yelled.
Footage showed an officer pressing his forearm on Anderson’s chest and an elbow in this neck.
“They’re trying to George Floyd me,” Anderson said in reference to the Black man killed by officers in Minnesota.
“We can only wonder what Keenan Anderson meant,” attorney Ben Crump said. “But if he meant that he would end up dead at the end of the encounter at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department then Keenan Anderson was correct. They George Floyd him.”
Chief Michel Moore said Anderson initially complied with officers as they investigated whether he was under the influence of drugs or alcohol. But he was subdued after struggling with officers who had chased him when he bolted.
Anderson ran in fear — as other Black men have — when additional officers responding to a call for backup rushed toward him, Douglas said.
The claim said officers used unreasonable deadly force, carelessly and mistakenly deployed the Taser, failed to follow training on the dangers of asphyxiation while handcuffing Anderson and conspired with each other to hide and distort information in false police reports.
An LAPD toxicology test found cocaine and cannabis in Anderson’s body, the chief said. The coroner’s office will also perform a toxicology report.
The officers haven’t been named yet but their union issued a statement saying the family and attorneys were “trying to shamelessly profit” from a “tragic incident.”
An LAPD spokesperson declined comment citing a policy not to comment on pending litigation.
After being subdued, Anderson went into cardiac arrest and died at a hospital about four hours later.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk testified Friday that his tweets aren’t that big a deal as he made an attempt to defend himself against a class-action lawsuit claiming investors lost billions of dollars over one of his posted messages about taking Tesla private.
“It’s difficult to say the stock price is linked to [a] tweet,” he told jurors in San Francisco federal court. “Just because I tweet about something doesn’t mean people believe it or will act accordingly,” he added, Reuters reported.
Musk is being sued for alleged fraud over the fortunes that were lost when he tweeted in August 2018 that he was taking his car company private and had “funding secured.”
The deal never happened, and investors who scooped up stock in a bid to profit from the plan lost money when it simply evaporated.
Musk insisted on the witness stand that his tweets “are truthful — just simply short,” even though he never took Tesla private and there was no evidence that he had secured funding.
He wasn’t asked specifically about the Tesla tweet, Reuters noted, but is expected to on Monday when he returns to the stand.
Musk said he’s generally providing “information the public should hear” but that there’s only so much that can be conveyed in a short Twitter post.
He also argued that his tweets aren’t that powerful, even though he has 127 million followers and a visible effect on those followers’ actions.
Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.
Musk’s attorney said Wednesday that his client was rushing to an airport when he made a “split-second decision” to post the tweet after reading a news article saying that Saudi Arabia was considering investing heavily in Tesla.
According to the shareholders’ suit, Musk illegally manipulated the stock price with his tweet, and he and Tesla’s board should be held accountable for an unspecified portion of billions of dollars in damages sustained by those who bought or sold the company’s stock after the tweet.
The suit is one of a mounting series of problems Musk is facing.
Twitter income has reportedly plunged 40% over the same time last year as advertisers backed away from the social media platform. Musk bought the company in October for $44 billion.
Musk is now also under fire for reportedly supervising the creation of a misleading video exaggerating the self-driving capabilities of Teslas, Bloomberg reported Thursday. “The car is driving itself,” says the intro to a video on Tesla’s “autopilot system.”
The video shows a driver tooling around town with his fingers just barely touching — or not touching at all — the steering wheel. Yet Tesla’s own website warns Autopilot drivers to “keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times.”
The car company is under increasing scrutiny for a series of accidents that occurred in vehicles while they were in the Autopilot mode.
Elon Musk took the witness stand Friday to defend a 2018 tweet claiming he had lined up the financing to take Tesla private in a deal that never came close to happening.
The tweet in which Musk claimed he had “funding secured” resulted in a $40 million settlement with securities regulators. It also led to a class-action lawsuit alleging he misled investors, pulling him into court Friday.
The mercurial billionaire took the witness stand wearing a dark suit on the third day of a civil trial in San Francisco that his lawyer unsuccessfully tried to move to Texas, where Tesla is now headquartered, on the premise that media coverage of his tumultuous takeover of Twitter had tainted the jury pool.
The nine-person jury assembled earlier this week will be responsible for deciding whether a pair of tweets that Musk posted on Aug. 7, 2018 damaged Tesla shareholders during a 10-day period after which Musk admitted that the buyout he had envisioned wasn’t going to happen.
A month later, Musk stepped down as Tesla’s chairman while remaining CEO as part of the Securities and Exchange Commission settlement without acknowledging any wrongdoing.
In the first of those two 2018 tweets, Musk stated he had “funding secured” for a what would have been a $72 billion buyout of Tesla at a time when the electric automaker was still grappling with production problems and was worth far less than it is now. Musk followed up a few hours later with another tweet suggesting a deal was imminent.
On the stand Friday, Musk — who last year bought Twitter for $44 billion — said tweeting is the “most democratic way” to communicate with investors.
“I care a great deal about retail investors,” he said during questioning by shareholder attorney Nicholas Porritt.
But he acknowledged that investors can get more detail in a traditional corporate filing with securities regulators, given the character limits set on Twitter.
“I think you can absolutely be truthful” on Twitter, Musk said. “But can you be comprehensive? Of course not.”
Even before Musk took the stand, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen had declared that the jurors can consider those two tweets to be falsehoods, leaving them to decide whether Musk deliberately deceived investors and whether his statements saddled them with losses.
Musk has previously contended he entered into the SEC settlement under duress and maintained he believed he had locked up financial backing for a Tesla buyout during meetings with representatives from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
A new focus
The trial over his Tesla tweets come at a time when he has been focusing on Twitter, which he acquired in October for $44 billion after trying to back out of that purchase.
Musk’s leadership of Twitter — where he has gutted the staff and alienated advertisers — has proven unpopular among Tesla’s current stockholders, who are worried he has been devoting less time steering the automaker at a time of intensifying competition. Those concerns contributed to a 65% decline in Tesla’s stock last year that wiped out more than $700 billion in shareholder wealth — far more than the $14 billion swing in fortune that occurred between the company’s high and low stock prices during the Aug. 7-17, 2018 period covered in the class-action lawsuit.
Tesla’s stock has split twice since then, making the $420 buyout price cited in his 2018 tweet worth $28 on adjusted basis now. The company’s shares were trading around $133 Friday, down from the company’s November 2021 split-adjusted peak of $414.50.
After Musk dropped the idea of a Tesla buyout, the company overcame its production problems, resulting in a rapid upturn in car sales that caused its stock to soar and minted Musk as the world’s richest person until he bought Twitter. Musk dropped from the top spot on the wealth list after the stock market’s backlash to his handling of Twitter.
As AI-generated images proliferate across the internet, two lawsuits are seeking to rein in the potent technology as well as ensure the artists who unwittingly helped train the tools are financially compensated for their work.
The litigation, which targets the company behind the Stable Diffusion engine, represents the first legal actions of its kind and could redefine the rights and protections of computer-generated art as the technology make rapid advancements.
A suit filed by Getty Images this week in the U.K. claims the company, Stability AI, illegally scraped the image service’s content. And a class-action lawsuit, filed in California federal court on behalf of three artists last week, alleges that the software’s use of their work broke copyright and other laws and threatens to put the artists out of a job.
The tool “is a parasite that, if allowed to proliferate, will cause irreparable harm to artists, now and in the future,” Matthew Butterick, one of the artists’ lawyers, alleged in a statement outlining the case.
AI’s “ability to flood the market with an essentially unlimited number of [similar] images will inflict permanent damage on the market for art and artists,” he claimed.
Copying or creating?
Stable Diffusion, released this year and now used by 10 million people a day, is just one of several tools that can almost instantaneously create images based on a string of text entered by the user. Similar technology is behind the apps DreamUp and DALL-E 2, both released last year.
To operate, these tools are first “trained” by being fed vast amounts of data. For instance, a system could absorb a billion images of dogs and, by parsing the differences and similarities between these images, come up with a definition for “dog” and eventually learn to reproduce a “dog.”
Stability AI, the first open-source image generator, trained its systems on images from across the internet. An independent analysis of the origin of those images shows at least 15,000 came from gettyimages.com; 9,800 from vanityfair.com; 35,000 from deviantart.net; and 25,000 from pastemagazine.com.
An image generated by Stable Diffusion from the text prompt “A cute corgi riding a bike.”
Stability AI
The court’s view of whether or not that violates copyright laws will likely depend on how it understands AI to function.
“One version of the story is, the AI system scoops up all these images and the system then ‘learns’ what these images look like so that it can make its own images,” said Jane Ginsburg, a professor of literary and artistic property law at Columbia University.
“Another version of the facts is the system is not only copying, it’s also pasting portions of the copied material, creating collages of the stored images, and that’s the claim that was filed in California — that these are actually big collage machines.”
This image, generated by Stabie Diffusion from the text prompt “A cute corgi riding a bike,” shows the limitations of AI, which often has trouble depicting human faces and hands.
Stability AI
The artists’ suit argues that, because the AI system only ingests images from others, nothing it creates can be original.
“Every output image from the system is derived exclusively from…copies of copyrighted images. For these reasons, every hybrid image is necessarily a derivative work,” the complaint alleges.
“Stability did not seek consent from either the creators of the Training Images or the websites that hosted them from which they were scraped,” the suit further claims. “Stability did not attempt to negotiate licenses for any of the Training Images. Stability simply took them.”
Since launching its publicly available apps, Stability A, recently valued at $1 billion, “is not sharing any of the revenue with the artists who created the Training Images nor any other owners of the Works,” the suit alleges.
How much revenue could that be, exactly? At the low end, artists could be owed $5 billion, their lawyers suggest.
The prompt “Painter sues computer” as rendered by Stable Diffusion.
Stability AI
A fair shake
The artists’ goal isn’t to stymie the development of AI but rather ensure creators get a fair financial shake, according to Joseph Saveri, one of the attorneys representing the three artists.
“Visual artists, especially professionals, aren’t naive about AI. Yes, it is going to become part of the social fabric, and yes, in certain cases it will displace jobs,” he said in an email. “What these artists object to, and what this case is about, is Stable Diffusion settling on a business strategy of massive copyright infringement from the outset.”
Getty Images has a similar argument, alleging that the software “unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright,” ignoring licensing options Getty offers for AI systems to use.
Stability AI is pushing back against these claims. “The allegations represent a misunderstanding about how our technology works and the law,” a spokesperson for the company said. The spokesperson added that Stability had not yet received formal notice of Getty’s legal action.
“Learning like people”
The CEO of Midjourney, another AI image creator and a defendant in the California suit, recently described the tool as similar to a human artist.
“Can a person look at somebody else’s picture and learn from it and make a similar picture?” David Holz told the Associated Press in December, before the suit was filed.
“Obviously, it’s allowed for people and if it wasn’t, then it would destroy the whole professional art industry, probably the nonprofessional industry too. To the extent that AIs are learning like people, it’s sort of the same thing and if the images come out differently, then it seems like it’s fine,” he said.
“It’ll create brand-new industries, and it will make media even more exciting and entertaining,” Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque recently told CBS Sunday Morning. “I think that creates loads of new jobs.”
But as champions of the technology tout its potential to expand human creativity, the creators currently doing the work are worried tech will put them out of a job.
“Why would someone hire someone when they can just get something that’s ‘good enough’?” Karla Ortiz, a concept artist, asked CBS Sunday Morning. Ortiz, one of the three artists suing Stability AI, spoke with CBS News before the suit was filed.
Cartoonist Sarah Andersen, another of the plaintiffs, has written about seeing her comics appropriated and parodied by online trolls and now crudely reproduced by AI search engines. Illustrator Molly Crabapple has called AI “another upward transfer of wealth, from working artists to Silicon Valley billionaires.”
Two renditions of “Dogs playing poker in the style of Picasso” as generated by Stable Diffusion.
Stability AI
Similarities to music piracy
The emergency of image-scraping AI is drawing comparisons to the late 1990s, when the music industry sued file-sharing service Napster, which people were using to copy and share music. Napster lost, went bankrupt and was later replaced by superior streaming-based music services such as Spotify, which license music from creators.
The following decade, the Authors Guild sued Google over the company’s Google Books project, which had scanned and stored copies of 15 million books, half of which were under copyright. By the time the case was decided in 2015, the court ruled that Google’s presentation of the text as snippets, as well as the security precautions it took, meant the project wasn’t, in fact, breaching copyright law.
“When the case was filed, not a lot of people would have thought that putting millions of books in the database of a for-profit company would be fair use. The law evolved and by the time the case was decided, it was fair use,” Columbia’s Ginsburg said.
Artists are hoping the case is decided more like Napster.
“The idea of streaming music was valid, but doing it legally ultimately meant bringing the songwriters and musicians to the bargaining table to make a deal,” Saveri said. “I think we’ll see the same pattern in AI — these companies will realize that they can offer better products by making fair deals with creators for training data.”
A Twitter user has sued the company over a data breach, days after an internet hacker site posted information allegedly gleaned from more than 200 million accounts.
New York state resident Stephen Gerber claims in his lawsuit, filed Friday in federal court in San Francisco, that his personal information was among data collected by Twitter hackers from July 2021 to January 2022. He seeks class-action status for all those whose information may have been hacked, and asked the court for unspecified monetary damages as well as an order requiring Twitter to hire third-party security auditors.
Gerber’s lawsuit blames a “defect” in Twitter’s application programming interface that allowed “cybercriminals to ‘scrape’ data from Twitter.”
The “compromised information” included user names, emails and phone numbers that could be used in phishing scams, the lawsuit says.
“Affected users” and authorities were “promptly notified,” and the “vulnerability” was fixed, said Twitter.
Twitter insisted in a blog post last week that there was “no evidence that the data now being sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter systems.” The data is “likely a collection of data already publicly available online through different sources,” the company said. Twitter didn’t immediately respond to Gerber’s lawsuit.
An anonymous poster on the hacker site BreachForums early this month published a database claiming to contain basic information about hundreds of millions of Twitter users.
Gerber’s lawsuit says Twitter has “seemingly buried its head in the sand about the magnitude” of the hack.
Twitter workers fired by owner Elon Musk as part of a massive staff reduction after he bought the company for $44 billion last year failed to win class-action status in a San Francisco court Friday.
U.S. District Judge James Donato ruled that five former Twitter employees accusing the company of failing to give adequate notice before their firing must press their claims in private arbitration because of employment agreements they signed with the company, CNN reported.
While still grappling with the fallout from a company he did take private, beleaguered billionaire Elon Musk is now facing a trial over a company he didn’t.
Long before Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in October, he had set his sights on Tesla, the electric automaker where he continues to serve as CEO and from which he derives most of his wealth and fame. Musk claimed in an August 7, 2018, tweet that he had lined up the financing to pay for a $72 billion buyout of Tesla, which he then amplified with a follow-up statement that made a deal seem imminent.
But the buyout never materialized and now Musk will have to explain his actions under oath in a federal court in San Francisco. The trial, which begins on Tuesday with jury selection, was triggered by a class-action lawsuit on behalf of investors who owned Tesla stock for a 10-day period in August 2018.
SEC fine
Musk’s tweets back then fueled a rally in Tesla’s stock price that abruptly ended a week later, after it became apparent that he didn’t have the funding for a buyout after all. That resulted in him scrapping his plan to take the automaker private, culminating in a $40 million settlement with U.S. securities regulators that also required him to step down as the company’s chairman.
Musk has since contended he entered that settlement under duress and maintained he believed he had locked up financial backing for a Tesla buyout during meetings with representatives from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
The trial’s outcome may hinge on the jury’s interpretation of Musk’s motive for tweets that U.S. District Judge Edward Chen has already decided were a falsehood.
Chen dealt Musk another setback on Friday, when he rejected Musk’s bid to transfer the trial to a federal court in Texas, where Tesla moves its headquarters in 2021. Musk had argued that negative coverage of his Twitter purchase had poisoned the jury pool in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Musk’s leadership of Twitter — where he has gutted the staff and alienated users and advertisers — has proven unpopular among Tesla’s current stockholders, who are worried he has been devoting less time steering the automaker at a time of intensifying competition.
Those concerns contributed to a 65% percent decline in Tesla’s stock last year that wiped out more than $700 billion in shareholder wealth — far more than the $14 billion swing in fortune that occurred between the company’s high and low stock prices during the Aug. 7-17, 2018 period covered in the class-action lawsuit.
Tesla shares slump
The lawsuit is based on the premise that Tesla’s shares wouldn’t have traded at such a wide range if Musk hadn’t dangled the prospect of buying the company for $420 per share. Tesla’s stock has split twice since then, making that $420 price worth $28 on adjusted basis now. The shares closed last week at $122.40, down from its November 2021 split-adjusted peak of $414.50.
After Musk dropped the idea of a Tesla buyout, the company overcame a production problem, resulting in a rapid upturn in car sales that caused its stock to soar and minted Musk as the world’s richest person until he bought Twitter. Musk dropped from the top spot on the wealth list after the stock market’s backlash to his handling of Twitter.
The trial is likely to provide insights into Musk’s management style, given the witness list includes some of Tesla’s current and former top executives and board members, including luminaries such as Larry Ellison, Oracle co-founder, as well as James Murdoch, the son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
The drama also may shed light on Musk’s relationship with his brother, Kimbal, who is also on the list of potential witnesses who may be called during a trial scheduled to continue through Feb. 1.
With Tesla vehicle sales slowing and its stock price tumbling, the company on Friday sharply slashed prices on several versions of its cars, making some models eligible for a new federal tax credit that could help spur buyer interest.
The company dropped prices nearly 20% in the U.S. on some versions of the Model Y SUV, its top seller. That cut will make more versions of the Model Y eligible for a $7,500 electric-vehicle tax credit that will be available through March. Tesla also reduced the base price of the Model 3, its least expensive model, by about 6%.
“We believe all together these price cuts could spur demand/deliveries by 12%-15% globally in 2023 and shows Tesla and Musk are going on the ‘offensive’ to spur demand in a softening backdrop,” Wedbush analyst said in a recent report.
Charlie Javice launched her company Frank in 2017 when she was 24 and a recent Ivy League grad with the goal of helping students apply for college financial aid. By 2021, she was lauded as a business visionary and had sold her startup to JPMorgan Chase for $175 million.
Now, JPMorgan claims that Frank’s inspiring story of helping more than 5 million students get into college was largely a fabrication, according to a lawsuit filed last month by the bank. Javice allegedly paid a data science professor $18,000 to contrive a list of more than 4 million fake student names in order to convince the financial giant to shell out the purchase price, the suit claims.
The allegations are the latest case of a highly lauded millennial company founder accused of fudging the truth to score financially, ranging from Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX to disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Meanwhile, Frank, once expected to help JPMorgan expand its reach among college students, has now been shuttered.
“[T]o cash in, Javice decided to lie, including lying about Frank’s success, Frank’s size and the depth of Frank’s market penetration in order to induce [JPMorgan] to purchase Frank for $175 million,” the bank alleges in the complaint.
Alex Spiro, an attorney for Javice, denied the allegations in a statement emailed to CBS MoneyWatch. JPMorgan “knows what they filed is retaliatory and misleading,” he said. “They were provided all the data upfront for the purchase of Frank and Charlie Javice highlighted the restrictions placed by student privacy laws during due diligence.”
He added, “When [JPMorgan] couldn’t work around those privacy laws after the purchase of Frank, JPMC began twisting the facts to cover their tracks and are falsely accusing Charlie Javice to retrade the deal.”
JPMorgan, which said Javice no longer works at the company, said it is asking for unspecified punitive and compensatory damages at trial.
“Proven acquisition machine”
The lawsuit outlines why JPMorgan was attracted to Frank when Javice, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, approached the bank in the summer of 2021. She touted the startup’s 4.25 million users, students who had started or completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, through Frank.
Forbes 30 Under 30:
— Charlie Javice: JP Morgan says she used millions of fake clients to dupe it into acquisition; — Caroline Ellison: CEO, Alameda Research, money fraud; — Elizabeth Holmes: CEO, Theranos, biotechnology convicted fraudster; — Sam Bankman-Fried: you know him. pic.twitter.com/CUCjlUcEtw
The FAFSA, which has a reputation for being a notoriously difficult application, is required by colleges, states and the Department of Education to qualify for financial aid, scholarships and more.
That pool of young customers was apparently like catnip for JPMorgan, which noted in its lawsuit that it believed “Frank was a proven acquisition machine for college-aged students.”
But, the lawsuit alleges, when JPMorgan asked Javice for proof that she had more than 4 million customers, she at first pushed back, claiming she couldn’t share the names due to privacy issues. Frank in fact had fewer than 300,000 customer accounts, the suit claims.
“After JPMC insisted, Javice chose to invent several million Frank customer accounts out of whole cloth,” the lawsuit alleges.
4.2 million fakes alleged
Javice allegedly turned to an unnamed professor at a New York City-area college to fix her problem, paying him $18,000 to create a list of names.
“Ultimately, the data science professor created a list of 4.265 million fake customer accounts (the ‘Fake Customer List’) as Javice had requested,” JPMorgan claims in the suit.
JPMorgan, unaware of the alleged problems at this point, completed the $175 million purchase, but realized something might be wrong when it sent out a marketing test campaign to Frank’s customer list. The results were “disastrous,” according to the complaint.
“JPMC sent marketing test emails to what it believed were 400,000 unique Frank customers,” the suit alleges. “Of the individuals contacted, only 28% of emails were delivered, compared to a 99% delivery rate JPMC usually sees with similar campaigns. Just 1.1% of the delivered emails were opened, compared to 30% for a typical JPMC campaign.”
Now suspicious, the bank reviewed Frank’s business, as well as emails, chats and messages between Javice, the data science professor and Frank’s chief growth officer, which the suit claims revealed the issues with Frank’s client list.
“In every aspect of her interactions with JPMC, Javice had a choice between (i) revealing the truth about her startup and accepting Frank’s actual value and (ii) lying to inflate Frank’s value and reaping the rewards from that inflation,” the lawsuit alleges. “Javice chose each time to lie, and the evidence shows that time and again she layered fraud upon fraud to deceive JPMC.”
The battle between Thom Browne and Adidas over a striped design signature dates back to 2007. But it’s reached new heights in 2023, with both companies appearing in Manhattan court over the trademark dispute.
Read on for the latest on the Adidas vs. Thom Browne trademark case.
The Lawsuit
Thom Browne football 2022 campaign
Photo: Courtesy of Thom Browne
Adidas has been using its three-stripe logo since the 1950s, and has a litigious streak when it comes to striped brand signifiers, previously winning similar disputes against brands like Sketchers, Juicy Couture and Marc Jacobs.However, Adidas is claiming (per ) it wasn’t made aware of the alleged infringement until a decade later, in 2018, when Thom Browne applied for a trademark of its Grosgrain Signature — a red, white and blue-stripe logo — in Europe and expanded into sportswear. (The latter, in the company’s eyes, made it a more direct competitor.) Adidas then approached the brand for a settlement.
Thom Browne’s varsity-stripe motif goes back 15 years. The brand’s initial version had three stripes; Robert T. Maldonado, Browne’s attorney in the case, alleges (per Vogue Business) that the brand pivoted to the current Four-Bar Signature after Adidas’ then-CEO reached out about the similarities between them in 2007.
However, according to CNN, Adidas is claiming it wasn’t made aware of alleged infringement until a decade later, in 2018, when Thom Browne applied for a trademark of its Grosgrain Signature — the a red, white and blue-stripe logo — in Europe and expanded into sportswear. (The latter, in the company’s eyes, made it a more direct competitor.) Adidas then approached the brand for a settlement.
After unsuccessful attempts to settle the matter on their own, Adidas went the legal route, filing a trademark infringement and dilution complaint against Thom Browne in the summer 2021. It claimed in a New York federal court that the brand is “selling athletic-style apparel and footwear featuring two, three or four parallel stripes in a manner that is confusingly similar to Adidas’s three-stripe mark,” and is seeking $867,225 in damages, as well as the $7,011,961 in profits.
Thom Browne CEO Rodrigo Bazan issued a statement to to WWDin response to the lawsuit at the time. “We believe we are right and we are confident in the outcome of the case, as we have acted honorably for all this time,” he said. “[Adidas] consented for 12 years and now they are changing their mind. The court won’t allow that. And consumers won’t as well. It is an attempt to use the law illegally.”
The Testimony
Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
On Monday, Jan. 9, Browne testified in front of an eight-person jury at Manhattan’s Southern District Court about his active upbringing in Pennsylvania, and how that resulted in a love of sports that ultimately inspired his use of varsity stripes. He said he wanted to create an “external signifier” that would render his label immediately recognizable, per reporting from WWD. This led him to the three stripes featured on varsity sweaters and collegiate pieces, speaking to the brand ethos of blending tailored clothing with sportswear.
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“Every collection and garment I design has a sporting reference,” he said, according to WWD.
To support the claim that the brand pivoted following a conversation with Adidas’ then-CEO about the stripes, Browne’s legal team juxtaposed design sketches from Fall 2008 (before the executive allegedly reach out, featuring three bars) with some from Spring 2009, which had the four bars.
Thom Browne is arguing that Adidas intentionally stayed silent on the issue for the following decade, during which time Thom Browne experienced significant growth. Adidas argues that it had no obligation to monitor Thom Browne’s output during that time.
Browne also reasons that, while the grosgrain red, white and blue ribbon has become a trademark of Thom Browne, the four parallel bars seen running down a suit leg or jacket arm are a design choice.
Charles Henn, who is representing Adidas, tried to differentiate tailored clothing from sportswear in court by asking Thom Browne to describe specific products via imagery — which the designer repeatedly characterized simply as “tailored sportswear.”
We’ll continue to update this story as new developments emerge.
UPDATE, Jan. 12, 5:00 p.m.:
Thom Browne has won the trademark case against Adidas. The eight-person jury found the American designer not guilty of infringing upon the sport giant’s three-stripe emblem.
On Thursday, attorneys for both Adidas and Thom Browne presented their final and closing arguments against the lawsuit. Browne’s supporters filled the right side of the courtroom, and were decked out in head-to-toe looks from the brand.
According to WWD, Maldonado (Browne’s attorney) began his closing argument with a simple statement: “Adidas does not own stripes.”
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