MGA Entertainment
T.I. and his wife Tameka âTinyâ Harris won a stunning $71 million jury verdict Monday in their lawsuit claiming that toymaker MGA stole the design of a line of âO.M.G.â toy dolls from their real-life teen pop group OMG Girlz.
As first reported by Law360, jurors awarded the couple and their companies the huge award after finding that MGAâs dolls infringed both the trade dress and the likeness rights of the OMG Girlz â a defunct musical trio created by Tiny and featuring her daughter Zonnique âStarâ Pullins.
Following a three-week trial and a day of deliberations, the jurors awarded the rapper and his wife $17.9 million in actual damages and another $53.6 million in punitive damages. Neither side immediately returned requests for comment.
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The legal battle began in 2021, with T.I. (real name Clifford Harris) and Tiny claiming that MGA had committed both âcultural appropriation and outright theft of the intellectual propertyâ by stealing the look of a group of âyoung multicultural women.â
Their complaint against MGA included side-by-side images, aiming to show how each OMG doll was directly based on a particular member of the OMG Girlz â Pullins, Bahja âBeautyâ Rodriguez, and Breaunna âBabydollâ Womack.
MGA maintained that it had done nothing wrong â that the dolls were more often branded as L.O.L. Surprise! O.M.G., and that consumers would not confuse the toys for the âshort-livedâ band.
Over three years of litigation, the case already went to trial twice. The first trial, in January 2023, ended in a mistrial after jurors heard inadmissible testimony featuring accusations of racism against MGA. The second trial then ended in a verdict for MGA, with jurors clearing the company of wrongdoing. But that verdict was later overturned on appeal, setting the stage for yet another trial.
On the third try, the outcome swung in favor of T.I. and Tiny. In a livestream on Instagram following the verdict, she said it had been âa hell of a fightâ but that âwe couldnât be more happy.â
âWe wanted to thank the jurors for just seeing us through this, and just believing in what we said,â she said in the video. âThey heard our story and they knew we wasnât lying. Itâs amazing.â
MGA can still appeal the verdict and the damages award, first by asking the judge to set them aside and then by taking the case to a federal appeals court.
Music publisher BMG is suing a toymaker for promoting a brand of âunicorn poopâ toys by releasing a song called âMy Poopsâ â a scatological parody set to the tune of Black Eyed Peasâ âMy Humps.â
In a lawsuit filed Thursday in Manhattan federal court, the publisher accused toymaker MGA Entertainment of infringing the copyright to the bandâs smash 2005 hit, which reached No. 3 on the Hot 100 and spent 36 total weeks on the chart.
Released to promote MGAâs Poopsie Slime Surprise toys â unicorns that release sparkling âunicorn poopâ slime â the song at issue features similar musical elements to the original, but with joke lyrics like âWhatcha gonna do with all that poop, all that poop.â
In addition to copying key musical elements, BMG says MGAâs song features a lead vocalist who âsounds very similarâ to Black Eyed Peas lead singer Fergie.
âMusic, especially a hit song such as âMy Humps,â adds great value when incorporated into a product or used in a video advertisement, because it increases consumer recognizability, consumer engagement and attention to the product,â BMG wrote in its lawsuit. âThe infringing work is so substantially similar to âMy Humpsâ that it is obvious that the infringing work was intentionally copied.â
MGAâs song was released as a music video on YouTube, but BMG claims the copycat song was also incorporated into actual products. A sticker on the Poopsie Slime Surprise packages directed users to the video, the publisher says, and the actual dolls will play a snippet of the song when a âheart-shaped bellybuttonâ is pressed.
âDefendant has been selling the Dancing Unicorn Toys incorporating the Infringing Work all over the world and has received substantial revenue,â BMGâs lawyers wrote. âThe Poopsie Slime Surprise product line has generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue for Defendant.â
In musical terms, BMG says that MGAâs song stole a number of key elements, including the melody, bass line, rhyme scheme, chord progression, cadence and others, and that the âMy Poopsâ singer uses âa similar delivery and vocal inflections as used by Fergie.â It also says the name of the song is âan obvious playâ on the name of the original.
Neither BMG nor MGA immediately returned requests for comment on Friday.
The new lawsuit sets the stage for a high-profile dispute over parody songs â a complex area of federal copyright law.
The legal doctrine of âfair useâ expressly empowers people to parody existing copyrighted works, and one of the U.S. Supreme Courtâs most seminal copyright rulings held that 2 Live Crew was legally allowed to release a bawdy parody of Roy Orbisonâs rock ballad âOh, Pretty Womanâ without paying royalties. But the music industryâs premiere parodist, âWeird Alâ Yankovic, voluntarily chooses to license all of the songs that he parodies. And the legal analysis is undoubtedly trickier when a parody song is used for outright commercial advertising or as part of an actual consumer product, rather than merely as a new song.
A more recent case pitted the Beastie Boys against a toy company called GoldieBlox, which released a viral parody of the groupâs 1987 song âGirlsâ to promote its engineering and construction toys for girls. After the band threatened copyright infringement, GoldieBlox argued fair use â saying it had aimed to criticize the âhighly sexistâ message of the original Beastie Boys track and âfurther the companyâs goal to break down gender stereotypes.â
But six months later, GoldieBlox agreed to a settlement in which it apologized to the Beastie Boys and agreed to donate a portion of its revenues to charities of the bandâs choosing.
Read BMGâs entire lawsuit here:
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