Fame by association

What do a Christian metal band and a hit animated movie have in common? Not a lot.Copyright infringement isn’t always a bad thing.I suppose if you’re a big deal — a big company or a big celebrity — you might want to throw your weight around and sue every little deal that seems remotely similar. What’s the point of being successful if you can’t be a bully?But what if you’re the little guy and a big guy does something that might be an infringement? The natural lawyer instinct is to sue, but that might not be a good idea for your client.Consider this quote from a federal lawsuit filed in Los Angeles:“Hi Demon Hunter, I just purchased tickets to your show in Albany NY for May 2, 2026 and after I accepted the tickets I realized you guys are not ‘K Pop demon hunters’ and that my 5 and 6yr old girls will probably not fit in well at your concert.”Can you guess who’s suing whom?A Christian metal band called “Demon Hunter” is suing the producers of the animated movie “KPop Demon Hunters” for, I guess, making the band more famous.(Side note in the interest of full disclosure: I’m an old guy who doesn’t listen to metal, Christian or heathen, and I loved the KPop movie. I also have no idea what Christian metal is supposed to be. You may consider my biases as you continue to read.)The lawsuit goes on at some length to describe how much more popular the movie is than the band. The movie has had more than 325 million views. The band “boasts more than 263,000” on YouTube. If there’s confusion, who’s benefiting whom?How many of you out there have been confused between the two? Might the confusion be quickly dispelled once you notice how each of them looks?Now search “Demon Hunter.” This is what I got on Google the other day:A screenshot of a search for "demon hunter." (Screenshot via Milt Policzer)The band is now most famous for suing Netflix. There’s the potential for many new fans unfamiliar with Christian metal.Hmm. Maybe there was a point to this lawsuit after all.Well told. I love to acknowledge examples of good writing here. We got a terrific demonstration of how to lure a reader in last week written by a federal court judge in Kansas. Tell me you don’t want to read a ruling that begins with this:“This is a case about a boat that sank. But the case just keeps on swimming.”And if that’s not enough to get you reading, there’s also the name of the defendant: Arch Nemesis, LLC.I was sold.Unfortunately, the ruling gets pretty boring after that promising start, so I’ll tell you how the story turns out: An insurance company didn’t have to pay for a sunken boat because Arch Nemesis didn’t fix a refrigerator that it said it would fix and didn’t provide receipts for a bunch of other fixes after it bought the insurance policy.The case has stopped swimming — we’ve been misled.Depressing lawyer note. The annual World Science Fiction Convention began last week in Anaheim and here’s my takeaway from an opening-day panel on “Law, Corporations, and Dystopia in SF/F:” Law is boring.If you want to write fictional legal stuff, don’t worry about being too realistic. Your novel shouldn’t take years to read.My advice is to put your fictional lawyers in tights and capes.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads