Panic! at the Disco company sues online sellers over alleged fake merch
Panic At The Disco LLC has sued anonymous e-commerce sellers it accuses of selling counterfeit Panic! at the Disco merchandise. The complaint was filed on 8 September in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago, according to court papers reported by Music Business Worldwide.
The sellers are not named. They are identified only on a Schedule A, a list of accused online stores filed under seal and kept from public view at the start of the case.
The New Jersey-based company says it owns the trademarks for the band Panic! at the Disco. It brings two counts under the Lanham Act, the main federal law on trademarks in the United States: trademark infringement and counterfeiting, and false designation of origin, a claim that a product is presented in a way likely to confuse buyers about who made it.
The complaint says the accused products were offered on eBay, SHEIN and Temu. It asks the court for injunctive relief, a court order to stop the alleged sales, plus an accounting of the sellers' profits and up to treble damages, meaning three times any proven losses.
In the alternative, the company seeks statutory damages of USD $2,000,000 for each and every use of its trademarks. Statutory damages are fixed sums set by law, awarded without proving the exact financial loss from each sale.
US District Judge John J. Tharp Jr. granted the company's motion to file parts of the case under seal on 10 September. He also set two early conditions for the case to move forward.
The company must file by 19 September a list of all prior online trademark, copyright or patent infringement cases in which it was a plaintiff in any US court. Any request for a temporary restraining order, a short-term order to halt sales while the case is heard, must include evidence that sales actually took place in Illinois, including proof that a defendant shipped products to the state, the judge ordered.
This is not the company's first case of this type in Chicago. Panic At The Disco LLC filed a prior Schedule A case in the same court in August 2023. That case went before Judge Sara L. Ellis and led to a preliminary injunction in September 2023 and a default judgment the following month after the defendants did not respond.
The Chicago court has become a busy venue for merchandise disputes. Live Nation merchandise subsidiary Merch Traffic filed its own Schedule A suit there on 5 August over merchandise linked to artists including Nirvana and Bruno Mars.
