This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro , offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between. This week: Pharrell Williams and Louis Vuitton face a trademark lawsuit over “Pocket Socks”; Diplo is hit with a lawsuit claiming he distributed “revenge porn”; the Village People move forward with a lawsuit against Disney; a longtime attorney repping Britney Spears moves on; and much more. SOCKED WITH A LAWSUIT – Pharrell Williams and Louis Vuitton were hit with a trademark lawsuit over their launch of a high-end line of “Pocket Socks” a literal sock-with-a-pocket that launched at Paris Fashion Week last year and sells for the whopping price of $530.
The case was filed by a California company called Pocket Socks Inc. that says it’s been using that same name for more than a decade on a similar product. AI FIRMS FIRE BACK – Suno and Udio, the two AI music startups sued by the major record label last week over allegations that they had stolen copyrighted works on a mass scale to create their models, fired back with statements in their defense .
Suno called its tech “transformative” and promised that it would only generate “completely new outputs”; Udio said it was “completely uninterested in reproducing content in our training set.” REVENGE PORN CLAIMS – Diplo was sued by an unnamed former romantic partner who accused him of violating “revenge porn” laws by s.
