MGA Entertainment
T.I. and his wife Tameka “Tiny” Harris won a stunning $71 million jury verdict Monday in their lawsuit claiming that toymaker MGA stole the design of a line of “O.M.G.” 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 MGA’s dolls infringed both the trade dress and the likeness rights of the OMG Girlz — a defunct musical trio created by Tiny and featuring her daughter Zonnique “Star” 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 “cultural appropriation and outright theft of the intellectual property” by stealing the look of a group of “young multicultural women.”
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 – Pullins, Bahja “Beauty” Rodriguez, and Breaunna “Babydoll” Womack.
MGA maintained that it had done nothing wrong — 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 “short-lived” 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 “a hell of a fight” but that “we couldn’t be more happy.”
“We wanted to thank the jurors for just seeing us through this, and just believing in what we said,” she said in the video. “They heard our story and they knew we wasn’t lying. It’s amazing.”
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 “unicorn poop” toys by releasing a song called “My Poops” – a scatological parody set to the tune of Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps.”
In a lawsuit filed Thursday in Manhattan federal court, the publisher accused toymaker MGA Entertainment of infringing the copyright to the band’s smash 2005 hit, which reached No. 3 on the Hot 100 and spent 36 total weeks on the chart.
Released to promote MGA’s Poopsie Slime Surprise toys – unicorns that release sparkling “unicorn poop” slime – the song at issue features similar musical elements to the original, but with joke lyrics like “Whatcha gonna do with all that poop, all that poop.”
In addition to copying key musical elements, BMG says MGA’s song features a lead vocalist who “sounds very similar” to Black Eyed Peas lead singer Fergie.
“Music, especially a hit song such as ‘My Humps,’ 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,” BMG wrote in its lawsuit. “The infringing work is so substantially similar to ‘My Humps’ that it is obvious that the infringing work was intentionally copied.”
MGA’s 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 “heart-shaped bellybutton” is pressed.
“Defendant has been selling the Dancing Unicorn Toys incorporating the Infringing Work all over the world and has received substantial revenue,” BMG’s lawyers wrote. “The Poopsie Slime Surprise product line has generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue for Defendant.”
In musical terms, BMG says that MGA’s song stole a number of key elements, including the melody, bass line, rhyme scheme, chord progression, cadence and others, and that the “My Poops” singer uses “a similar delivery and vocal inflections as used by Fergie.” It also says the name of the song is “an obvious play” 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 – a complex area of federal copyright law.
The legal doctrine of “fair use” expressly empowers people to parody existing copyrighted works, and one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most seminal copyright rulings held that 2 Live Crew was legally allowed to release a bawdy parody of Roy Orbison’s rock ballad “Oh, Pretty Woman” without paying royalties. But the music industry’s premiere parodist, “Weird Al” 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 group’s 1987 song “Girls” to promote its engineering and construction toys for girls. After the band threatened copyright infringement, GoldieBlox argued fair use – saying it had aimed to criticize the “highly sexist” message of the original Beastie Boys track and “further the company’s goal to break down gender stereotypes.”
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 band’s choosing.
Read BMG’s entire lawsuit here:
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