Many lawsuits, by their nature, come to resemble a back-and-forth or tit-for-tat or whichever colloquialism you may prefer; few are willing to sit idly by and let a case be brought and then built against them without taking some recourse, particularly given that many suits result from an inability to resolve the matter at hand without the intervention of the courts. Thus lawsuits breed countersuits, business becomes personal and disputes turn into feuds that can potentially run for years.
If years of gossip and innuendo are to be believed (and I leave that to your discretion) Taylor Swift isn’t adverse to a feud herself; rather than a fellow artist or celebrity, however, her latest beef seems to be with a lesser-known theme park in Utah.
You may remember a story recently about Evermore, the theme park that was suing Swift for trademark infringement related to her album of the same name. The case presented by the park was rather speculative, and while it was rather unlikely to have prevailed on the merits, it proved enough of a nuisance to provoke a response.
Techdirt reports that Swift’s management company, TAS Rights Management, has hit back with a suit alleging copyright infringement on the part of Evermore the park — not for the name of branding, but for allegedly performing Swift’s music without license or permission. The suit goes into detail, naming the particular attraction and its alleged repeated infringement of copyrighted works by Swift and others.
As Geigner notes, the facts as presented bode poorly for Evermore’s case. Swift’s label reached out on numerous occasions regarding the ongoing infringement, only to be ignored by the park. If that weren’t bad enough, Evermore also attempted to cover their back entrance by seeking a license for said songs when it became apparent that this suit was in the works, which looks only slightly less guilty than Googling “how to cover up evidence of copyright infringement”.
All that of course needs to be proved in a court of law, but at first blush it appears more than a set of trumped-up claims that one might expect if you were to see the suit as a retaliatory exercise. Should the assertions prove true, or true by the standard applied in court, it would appear that Evermore has made a grave miscalculation in bringing the initial trademark suit, unless they were to prevail against all odds. They seem to have messed with the wrong artists, and now they’ve created bad blood.
