The Libertarian National Committee has made a 200-page filing asking for a preliminary injunction against Michigan Libertarians Mike Saliba, Rafael Wolf, Greg Stempfle, Angela Thornton-Canny, Jami Van Alstine, Mary Buzuma, Dave Canny and Joseph Brungardt, asking that they be enjoined from using the LNC’s trademarks “Libertarian Party” and “Libertarian Logo”.
The LNC claims
Without such an order, Defendants will continue willfully and maliciously infringing on the LNC’s marks, diluting the LNC’s marks, and misleading the public through false advertising and through claims, presumptions, or insinuations of affiliation with the Plaintiff, to the detriment of Plaintiff. Defendants will continue to use Plaintiff’s trademarks to conduct fraudulent solicitation of political donations, making misrepresentations to the FEC and the State Case 5:23-cv-11074-JEL-EAS ECF No. 5, PageID.142 Filed 06/01/23 Page 1 of 25 of Michigan claiming the status of being the authorized state committee of the LNC and entitled to use its trademark in a corporate name, engaging in unfair competition with the LNC’s authorized affiliate and user of its trademarks, and causing irreparable harm to the LNC.
Independent Political Report is not here assessing the validity of the LNC’s claims; nor is it estimating the cost to the LNC of preparing and making the filing.
A request:
The case in Michigan seems to center on who is actually the state party. There have been a number of articles over the past months on this situation, pointing out various actions by the parties involved.
I tried searching for all of the past postings, but found it difficult to put together. Would it be out of line to suggest asking one of the IPR editors to put together some sort of updated index of these articles, perhaps with a short one ore two sentence summarizing each, with a link to the original article? A brief summary of the timeline might also be useful to readers.
Actually it is likely a fraudulent claim. In the filing, which I have just read, the LNC claims a 2001 trademark on Libertarian Party and 2015 on the current logo.
While I agree they have standing on the logo, if the former affiliate can show continued use of Libertarian Party by their organization, starting prior to 2001, the LNC has no legitimate claim.
Although I am not an attorney, I speak from personal experience on this issue. About 25 years ago, a company that I was the majority shareholder in, and that had been operating for nearly a decade, was sued for trademark violation on our company name. The organization that sued us was the United Nations. I kid you not.
They had sued companies and organizations in the US and around the world for use of that same name. Going into it, our attorney told us that we would likely lose, facing damages, and having to rebrand our company completely.
We won.
I was able to produce our original business license, dated literally a month before the trademark filing by the United Nations. They were stunned, and offered to settle.
While we were forced to agree to only operate with that name in the state of South Carolina, where the business license had been filed and we were incorporated, we were allowed to use our name because we existed prior to the trademark filing. I was later told by our attorney that other than our company and one other organization, everyone else lost. I spent thousands of dollars on the time our attorney spent dealing with it, but we suffered no other damage costs, and certainly not the great expense of coming up with a new name and rebranding everything.
So if even the United Nations can lose, a good legal team can beat the LNC on this.
Obviously a new entity could not start using the name, but state affiliates organized prior to 2001 could win. All it will take is the documentation filed with their state from when the affiliate was created.
This will be an interesting case to follow. I look forward to reading the defendants’ reply.
The operations of the LNC over the past year, and actions in state libertarian parties and groups, have led to much discussion. A recent series of opinion pieces on the topic, notably from Stewart Flood and from Starchild, appear on the pages of our sister publication ThirdPartyWatch.com.
Not fraudulent at all. The LNC is doing the correct thing. The phony Michigan chapter is clearly infringing on trademarks.
I wonder how much the LNC paid for those 200 pages of attempts to put lipstick on its fraudulent IP / party name monopoly claims?