Thu, Sep 24th 2020 7:58pm
Timothy Geigner
Back in April, we wrote about a trademark dispute between Jack Daniels and VIP Products LLC. At issue was a doggy chew toy made as clear parody of the Jack Daniels bottle, with the branding changed to Bad Spaniels , along with other parody references. While Jack Daniels had initially won in court when VIP sought declaratory judgement that its use was non-infringing, upon appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th District, that decision was reversed. Key to that ruling was the court s assessment that, due to the parody nature of the product, it was an expressive work , and the lower court ought to therefore have applied the Rogers test, and vacated an injunction the lower court had applied.