Singer Taylor Swift asks Los Angeles court to dismiss lawsuit — Rolling Stone
In the United States, lawyers for singer Taylor Swift have asked a federal court in Los Angeles to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Las Vegas performer Maren Wade over an alleged trademark infringement. Wade claims that the title of Swift’s album The Life of a Showgirl infringes on her Confessions of a Showgirl trademark rights, Rolling Stone reports.
In court filings, Swift’s representatives called the plaintiff’s claims groundless. They argue that the assumption that consumers could be confused about Swift’s connection to Wade’s podcast, book, or cabaret performances is illogical. A hearing on Swift’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit is scheduled for early October.
Arguments of Swift’s defense
The singer’s lawyers insist that the album The Life of a Showgirl is an expressive work protected from trademark claims. In their view, T-shirts and other promotional merchandise connected with the record are also a logical extension of such a work.
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The defense also said that Wade’s claims under California’s unfair competition law improperly seek to apply that law to a plaintiff from Nevada. Separately, Swift’s lawyers challenge the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles federal court, citing the fact that the singer resides in Tennessee.
Maren Wade’s position
Wade filed the lawsuit in March and asked the court to temporarily halt merchandise sales while the case is pending. She developed the Confessions of a Showgirl trademark from a column she began writing for Las Vegas Weekly in 2014: later, a stage show, a touring production, a book, a podcast, and a registered trademark appeared under that name.
Wade’s representative previously said that his client had spent more than 12 years building her own trademark, which, in his view, was swallowed up by a large-scale commercial campaign. At the same time, Swift’s lawyer argued at a May hearing that Wade herself had used Swift-related hashtags to direct traffic to her commercial website and had not objected to the album title for eight months.
