The production company with the copyrights and trademarks for the “Hamilton” Broadway musical is reportedly suing two companies in federal court — San Francisco’s GearLaunch and Michigan-based SunFrog — claiming they have broken federal trademark law.
According to its website, GearLaunch “offers customized white labeled websites and end-to-end ecommerce solutions,” while SunFrog is a Web-based custom T-shirt maker.
The lawsuit charges the the companies with illegally exploiting the popular production with the unauthorized clothing, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Creative Goods Merchandise, which has an exclusive sub-license to use the official Hamilton logo, is the only legitimate manufacturer, THR reported Friday.
According to THR, the court filing seeks the companies to pay out the profits they garnered from the unlicensed merchandise or statutory damages, on top of a court injunction to prevent the companies from making, marketing or selling the unlicensed merchandise.
In a statement emailed on Oct. 11 to The Washington Times, a company spokesperson said that at GearLaunch, their “priority is providing services that best support sellers in building successful e-commerce businesses, and as part of that we work hard to ensure our sellers understand that they must respect the intellectual property rights of others.”
“We have robust policies in place to prevent sellers using our platform from violating intellectual property laws. What’s more, we take seriously any violations that do occur by working with sellers to correct issues.”
The spokesperson added, however, company policy forbids “comment on pending litigation.”
• Ken Shepherd can be reached at kshepherd@washingtontimes.com.
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