JEALOUS AGAIN

Back in January, I wrote a little thing about the two different versions of Black Flag that were gearing up to go to battle. Then in May, I updated the story after Greg Ginn's Black Flag posted a new song and the Keith Morris version, just called Flag, posted a video of one of their shows.

Well, after a long hot summer, there's another update to fill you in on.

In August, Greg Ginn - who was already losing the battle because Keith Morris' group had all the cool people in in - decided to file a lawsuit. He was basically trying to bar Morris from using the Black Flag logo, make it hard for his group to tour and play the Black Flag songs and named Henry Rollins in the suit claiming that he and Morris went behind his back to try and copyright the logo or something. Things were said, papers were served and everyone's been fighting behind the scenes ever since.

Yesterday, it ended. For a while, at least.

A U.S. District Court judge in California determined that Ginn's lawsuit was bullshit, that people could tell the difference between the two bands and that Ginn couldn't prove that he alone owned the Black Flag name and/or logo. Bootleg merch had been on the market since 2008 and in 2009 a Japanese company registered the band name. Morris and his lawyers argued that since neither of those things prompted any legal action from Ginn or his label, SST, both had fallen into "generic use."

The judge also stated that no one could clearly determine who the last remaining member of Black Flag actually was and that since they'd filed taxes under the title "Black Flag Partnership," Morris and Rollins had every right to try and trademark the name and logo under that banner.

That last part stemmed from this little gem: "the defendants’ claim that the Black Flag assets were owned by a statutory partnership comprised of various former band members – even if these members only consisted of Henry and Ginn, based on (a) accepting Ginn’s argument that he never quit and given that there is no evidence or allegation that Henry ever quit – has merit;"

The judge basically ruled that Rollins never quit the band, so he was still technically allowed to do whatever he wanted with the name and logo - even if he's not actually in either of the new incarnations.

Here's the rest of the judge's ruling that I got from SPIN.com, who obtained it through Keith Morris' camp.

(1) the court found that SST had no rights in the trademarks;
(2) Ginn seemed to have no individual rights in the Black Flag trademarks;
(3) even if either had had any rights in those marks, they had abandoned those rights through a failure to police the mark for nearly 30 years;
(4) the defendants’ claim that the Black Flag assets were owned by a statutory partnership comprised of various former band members – even if these members only consisted of Henry and Ginn, based on (a) accepting Ginn’s argument that he never quit and given that there is no evidence or allegation that Henry ever quit – has merit;
(5) that even if the plaintiffs had some trademark claim in the marks, there was no likelihood of consumer confusion between Black Flag and Flag given the ample press coverage over the dispute; and
(6) the trademark application and registration that Henry and Keith made was done in good faith (e.g. not fraudulently) – and is thus not necessarily subject to cancellation – given that they understood their actions to have been done on the part of the Black Flag partnership (see No. 4, above).

The battle rages on.