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Greg Ginn loses the Battle of Black Flag

This year’s legal battle between Black Flag founder Greg Ginn and Keith Morris’ Flag band has finally come to an abrupt end with the courts ruling that Ginn does not have the rights to won the trademark on the band. Spin broke the news overnight with the following statement:

A judge found that: SST has no rights to the Black Flag copyright; Ginn has no special rights to any of the trademarks; neither Ginn nor the label gave a damn about copyrghts or trademarks until now; Rollins never quit Black Flag (!); fans are smart enough to know which band is which; and nobody tried to screw anybody over, so let’s all give it a rest.

Here’s what all of that looks like in legalese, via FLAG’s 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).

It also looks like Black Flag’s original artist Ray Pettibon is backing Flag’s corner and has designed them a brand new t-shirt this week. This has a been a sad news story where money rules the roost once again. We hope we do not get to see any more of these cases in the future. Damaged indeed.