It's a good day to be Erik Brunetti, as the Supreme Court has handed the FUCT founder a major win in a perplexing trademark dispute case.
"The clothing line is pronounced as four letters, one after the other: F-U-C-T," Justice Elena Kagan said Monday of the 6-3 majority ruling, per NBC News' report. "But you might read it differently and, if so, you would hardly be alone."
What this means in simpler terms is that the court knocked down a federal law provision that barred the registration of proposed trademarks deemed "scandalous or immoral," a distinction some had apparently said applied to the trademarking of the FUCT brand. Such a provision, Kagan said, amounts to a First Amendment violation.
We last heard of this debacle back in April, at which point Brunetti was still in the throes of fighting back against trademark blocks using the same (and accurate) First Amendment angle. At the time, Brunetti also pointed to a trademark rejection's impact on the proliferation of FUCT fakes, which of course leads to a loss of profits for his team.
In a statement Monday, Justice Samuel Alito noted that this latest update doesn't necessarily mean that a more refined version of such limitations wouldn't one day be introduced. The justices' decision, Alito said, wasn't based on "moral relativism but on the recognition that a law banning speech deemed by government officials to be 'immoral' or 'scandalous' can easily be exploited for illegitimate ends."
FUCT, meanwhile, recently launched a Richardson collab complete with middle finger emoji:
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