Court Dismisses Medieval Times’ Trademark Suit Against Its Own Employee’s Union

Roughly a year ago, we discussed one of a few instances of a company filing a trademark infringement lawsuit against its own employees as a retaliation tactic for those employees forming a union. In this specific case, it was the company behind Medieval Times, an organization that builds fake castles and sells food and drink while customers watch fake jousting matches. The suit was fairly laughable by my estimation, with the complaint for some reason listing claims of the union having confusing symbols and iconography in its branding, alongside pictorial evidence of the exact opposite. There was little that was similar in any of this and the claims that the public would somehow be confused by branding and a website that was directly hostile to the corporation was absolutely silly. In other words, it seemed very clear that this was a bullying tactic, in retribution for the forming of the labor union in the first place.

And now it seems the court has agreed that the infringement claims were indeed silly.

In anopinionissued Thursday, the judge said the dinner theater chain failed to demonstrate that the union, called Medieval Times Performers United, was creating confusion" among consumers and leading people to believe the labor group was somehow endorsed by the company.

The Court concludes there is no plausible likelihood of confusion," wrote Judge William J. Martini of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.

The ruling itself obviously goes into much more detail than that, putting the claims of infringement through the Lapp test. The Lapp test is a series of criterium to determine whether one trademark in use is indeed likely to cause confusion with that of the accuser's. Those factors include:

1. The degree of similarity between the owner's mark and the alleged infringing mark;
2. The strength of the owner's mark;
3. The price of the goods and other factors indicative of the care and attention expected of consumers when making a purchase;
4. The length of time the defendant has used the mark without evidence of actual confusion arising;
5. The intent of the defendant in adopting the mark;
6. The evidence of actual confusion;
7. Whether the goods, though not competing, are marketed through the same channels of trade and advertised through the same media;
8. The extent to which the targets of the parties' sales efforts are the same;
9. The relationship of the goods in the minds of consumers because of the similarity of function;
10. Other facts suggesting that the consuming public might expect the prior owner to manufacture a product in the defendant's market, or that he is likely to expand into that market.

For the vast majority of those factors, the court sides heavily with the union, and for obvious reasons. The union took great pains to make it very clear that it is not affiliated with the Medieval Times corporation, even going so far as to note on its website landing page that the union was on strike. To use but one example, on the question of the similarity of the branding for the company and union, the court writes:

Although both employ red and yellow in some fashion (in the logos and costumes), Medieval Times' is written in different stylized fonts and colors," Martini wrote in his opinion, which was firstreported by Bloomberg Law. The Medieval Times Mark is written in yellow or red lettering in contrast to the [union] logo which is in black font."

In sum," he added, neither a side-by-side comparison nor the overall impression is confusingly similar."

Notably in terms of the claim that all of this is part of the company's plan to unfairly punish or discourage the forming of the union and its membership, the NLRB has filed a complaint against the company accusing it of other unfair labor practices.

We'll see where that ends up going, but it appears that the abuse of trademark law in order to bully the union will no longer be one of the company's arrows in its quiver.