Culture
Outkast, Who Misspelled Their Own Name, Now Suing Someone Else For Misspelling Theirs
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
ATLANTA, GA -- OutKast, the Grammy-winning duo responsible for "Hey Ya," "Ms. Jackson," and the conscious decision sometime around 1992 to replace the C in Outcast with a K, has filed a trademark infringement claim against Ovrkast, a rising rapper from California whose name replaces the A in Overcast with nothing, which is a different letter crime entirely and should not be confused.
The suit alleges that consumers hearing the two names could become confused, which legal observers note would require consumers to be confused about whether they were listening to a rap duo that reunited once in 2014 for Coachella and has not spoken about new music since, or a 26-year-old from Inglewood with 340,000 monthly Spotify listeners and a SoundCloud from 2019 still titled "rough drafts plz dont share."
OutKast's legal team described the similarity as "unmistakable," which is the word attorneys use when they need a federal judge to believe something the judge can clearly see is mistakable.
Professor Elliot Farnsworth III of Harvard Law School was asked to weigh in, and did so at length. "The controlling question," Farnsworth explained in a phone interview, pausing to allow the gravity of it to settle, "is whether the relevant consuming public, upon encountering the mark Ovrkast, would experience a likelihood of confusion with the senior mark OutKast, and I want to be very clear that I am not done speaking yet."
Farnsworth went on for eleven more minutes. His conclusion was that the case has merit, that it also has significant counterarguments, and that his retainer is non-refundable regardless of which of those things turns out to be true.
The irony that OutKast built their entire aesthetic identity on the premise of being misspelled on purpose, of taking a word that meant one thing and respelling it to mean something cooler and more legally theirs, has not been lost on the internet, which spent Tuesday generating the predictable jokes and then generating less predictable ones when it turned out Big Boi had actually filed the paperwork himself and Andre 3000 had not returned calls, possibly because he was playing the flute somewhere in a field, which is what he does now.
Ovrkast, for his part, released a statement through his manager saying he had chosen the name in 2018 because it "reflected a vibe," and that he was not aware of any trademark issue, and that he would like to continue reflecting the vibe without litigation. His attorney noted that removing the A from Overcast is not the same creative decision as replacing the C with a K, and that the two names do not sound alike when spoken aloud, which is usually how rap names are encountered.
OutKast's filing disagrees. The filing is 94 pages.
Farnsworth said the precedent most favorable to OutKast involves a 2003 case concerning two competing pretzel companies in Ohio and is, he acknowledged, "not a perfect analogy."
Andre 3000 has still not commented. His flute, reached for statement, also said nothing, but did so beautifully and in a tuning that suggested he has moved on from this entirely.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/outkast-ovrkast-change-name-trademark-expert-1235633632/