Naruto anime producer and licensee TV Tokyo won its lawsuit against multiple actors found to have infringed on trademarks and copyrights for the popular Naruto IP. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois entered a default judgment (the defendants didn’t respond) on May 28 against 47 defendants. They must now each pay $100,000 for willful federal trademark and copyright infringement. Below are examples of counterfeit items sold by the defendants.
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TV Tokyo brought the lawsuit over the defendants creating numerous stores, designed “to appear to be selling genuine products licensed by Plaintiff [TV Tokyo], while selling inferior imitations of Plaintiff’s products.” TV Tokyo adds that it “has been and continues to be irreparably damaged through consumer confusion, dilution, and tarnishment of its valuable trademarks as a result of Defendants’ actions and seeks injunctive and monetary relief.” The trademarks were all filed in the 2000s by Naruto‘s manga publisher, Shueisha.
The guilty defendants are now barred from engaging in further counterfeiting. Their websites will also be seized and either transferred to TV Tokyo or made inactive and untransferable. Given that counterfeiters often operate under multiple aliases, multiple defendants in this lawsuit may refer to the same actor. In this event, the judge ruled that the $100,000 cost of damages applies to each actor only once, reducing the amount TV Tokyo will receive in damages. The defendants’ payment providers, such as PayPal and Amazon Pay, were given 7 days to block the counterfeiters from transferring their funds (up to the $100,000 order).
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The list of counterfeiters is below:
This judgment follows VIZ Media’s successful lawsuit over RWBY trademark and copyright infringement in April, similarly filed at the District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. A judge awarded VIZ $200,000 in damages for each of the 131 defendants, totaling $26.2 million. The Amazing Digital Circus producer, Glitch Productions, recently filed a lawsuit in April over counterfeit goods.
TV Tokyo and Studio Pierrot produced the Naruto and Shippuden anime, which adapt Masashi Kishimoto’s manga of the same name from Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump. VIZ licensed both anime series for North America. Crunchyroll streams all episodes of Naruto and Naruto Shippuden in English subbed. Hulu streams the first 198 (out of 220) episodes of Naruto and all Shippuden episodes in English subbed and dubbed, describing the former:
The Village Hidden in the Leaves is home to the stealthiest ninja in the land. But twelve years earlier, a fearsome Nine-tailed Fox terrorized the village before it was subdued and its spirit sealed within the body of a baby boy–Naruto Uzumaki!
Source: Final default judgment order (PDF), Naruto trademark filings (PDF)
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