Mobb Deep is dealing with a lawsuit over a latest collaboration with streetwear model Supreme. Filed by a New York Metropolis hardcore punk band Sick of It All, the swimsuit claims that Mobb Deep members Havoc and the late Prodigy stole their dragon-shaped brand.
In a lawsuit filed Friday, the band accused each Supreme and Mobb Deep of infringing its logos with a line of T-shirts launched this summer season. The case claims that Mobb Deep’s emblem, featured on the shirts, is “just about similar” to a brand that Sick of It All has used since 1987.
“This case arises out of defendants’ improper and unlawful use of an almost similar brand mark to plaintiff’s inherently distinctive, incontestable, and well-known brand,” wrote legal professionals for Bush Child Zamagate Inc., the corporate that owns Sick of It All’s mental property. “Defendants’ adoption and use of their knockoff brand … isn’t just reckless and inexplicable — it’s willful infringement and unfair competitors.”
As defendants, the lawsuit named Chapter 4 Corp., the proprietor of Supreme; Kejuan Muchita Inc., a company entity owned by Havoc; and the property of Prodigy (Albert Jackson Johnson), who died in 2017.
Again in June, when Supreme launched the Mobb Deep shirts, the web site Hypebeast tried to elucidate the origins of the duo’s brand. The “tribal tattoo-style dragon,” the location claimed, had been “borrowed” from Sick of It All — “who, like Mobb Deep, is from Queens, New York.”
Seems, Sick of It All doesn’t see the story fairly the identical manner.
In Friday’s lawsuit, their legal professionals say that, over the course of three many years, they’ve repeatedly demanded that Mobb Deep cease utilizing the dragon design, first in 1997 and once more in 2003. The brand new criticism included a replica of a cease-and-desist that the band despatched in 2003, after a model of the dragon brand was utilized in an insert included in Mobb Deep’s Free Brokers: The Murda Mixtape.
“This isn’t the primary time that plaintiff has objected to Mobb Deep’s use of a brand considerably similar to plaintiff’s mark,” the brand new criticism reads. “Instantly previous to the establishment of this lawsuit, plaintiff demanded that defendants stop use of their infringing brand and supply an accounting to plaintiff of gross sales of the infringing items. Defendants refused to adjust to these calls for.”
In 2011, Mobb Deep spoke concerning the brand in an interview with clothes model Mishka NYC. In it, Prodigy defined he mainly picked the picture off of a tattoo parlor wall when he was an adolescent and received it inked to his hand.
“Principally, after I was 14 or 15, there was this tattoo parlor in Elmart off Hemstead turnpike and I had walked in there to get my first tattoo,” he stated. “There was this dragon on the wall and I didn’t know what it was, I simply thought it appeared ailing, I used to be mad younger and I had all the time wished one thing on my hand. I prolly seen it on a few of these L.A. gang motion pictures like Colours. I assumed’d be cool, it’d appear to be some robust shit. So I informed the dude put that on my hand. When me and Hav began Mobb Deep, we turned it into the lil clique factor.”
Prodigy went on to say, “We wished to show it into the emblem for Mobb Deep, however, then we received a stop and desist letter within the mail…. That was just a few random sh–! We didn’t even know, we was simply younger youngsters.”
Representatives for Supreme and Mobb Deep didn’t instantly return requests for remark.
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