Luke Combs fan ordered to pay $250,000 for selling unauthorized merch

Luck Combs said it “sickens me” to learn that a Florida woman who sold unofficial tumblers bearing his likeness has been sued by his team.

Nicol Harness, a fan who makes her living selling T-shirts and tumblers on Amazon, was served a copyright lawsuit by Combs’ representatives in October, but she never caught it. The lawsuit was sent by email instead of in person — something the Northern District of Illinois federal court allows — and it went to her junk mail, according to CBS. Harness only found out she was being sued after she realized the $5,500 in her Amazon seller account had been frozen.

The singer behind the remake of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” has a team that is supposed to take down counterfeiting, but from “large corporations that operate internationally that make millions and millions of dollars – making counterfeit T-shirts, things like that, running illegal businesses,” not small fan businesses, Combs said. a video message yesterday (Dec. 13) titled “Reaction to Lawsuit”. Combs said he became aware of Harness’ plight after seeing a WFLA news report of her crying over the default sentence given to her since she failed to respond.

Combs immediately sent Harness $11,000—double the amount frozen in her Amazon account—and said he would set up a more ongoing fundraising channel for Harness and her family to help her with medical bills related to her heart disease. Combs also said he would fly Harness and her family to an upcoming concert so he could meet her.

Luke Combs tumbles copyright infringement lawsuit, by the numbers

$380: Harness’s total earnings from the sale of 18 Luke Combs-themed tumblers at $20 each.

$11,000: The amount Combs sent to Harness. “She was never supposed to be involved in something like this. No fan should be involved in something like this,” Combs said in his video message.

45: Other sellers in the lawsuit appear to have large operations in Asia

Musicians’ Mass Pickup of Counterfeit Items in Illinois

At the beginning of 2023, singer Harry Styles’ lawyers filed a lawsuit which aims to remove counterfeit items originating from China and “other foreign jurisdictions with a lax trademark enforcement system” across multiple platforms, including Amazon and Etsy.

Styles’ case was filed in the same Chicago court as Combs’ case. In fact, that’s where several people and brands, including the National Basketball Association, have flowed in the past decade. That’s all because of a “Schedule A” filing that allows companies to file intellectual property complaints against a number of online merchants — sometimes hundreds — under a single docket.

This mass-defendant intellectual property litigation, which allows plaintiffs to quickly go after high-volume infringers and save on court filing fees, occurs most often in the Northern District of Illinois, as per March 2023 research by Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman.

However, lumping dozens or hundreds of defendants together can create problems. While the process does help shut down some counterfeiters, “the ends don’t justify the means,” according to Goldman. He reasons that rights owners can exploit this dynamic “to extract settlements from online merchants without satisfying basic procedural safeguards, such as serving the complaint and establishing personal jurisdiction over defendants”—exactly what Harness is caught up in.

“Instead, judges and regulators must do more to protect the interests of the many thousands of victimized merchants as well as the marketplaces and their consumers,” Goldman writes. “Right holders have other ways to combat foreign counterfeiters without flouting the rule of law.”