FKA Twigs Wins First Round in Legal Trademark Battle With Indie Band The Twigs
FKA Twigs has defeated trademark infringement claims over her stage name, with a judge ruling that indie band The Twigs forfeited its right to sue due to years of inaction.
The Tuesday (Aug.
18) ruling, first obtained and reported by Billboard , dismisses infringement claims lodged in May by The Twigs (twin sisters Laura Good and Linda Good) against FKA Twigs (Tahliah Barnett).
The case is not yet over, since the Eusexua artist still has pending claims of her own against the sisters.
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Breakthrough The Twigs first sued FKA Twigs back in 2014 for infringing the trademark they’d owned since 1996, though they dropped that lawsuit after losing an initial injunction request.
Things went quiet until a decade later, when the sisters again began arguing that FKA Twigs had used her greater fame to “weaken, if not destroy” their own intellectual property.
On Thursday, U.S.
District Judge Jed S.
Rakoff ruled that The Twigs’ infringement claims are time-barred.
Technically speaking, the judge held that the claims are too old under the doctrine of laches, which prohibits the unreasonable delay of legal action.
“The Goods were aware of Barnett’s allegedly infringing activity as early as 2013 when the parties exchanged emails, and certainly no later than 2014 when the Goods sued Barnett alleging trademark infringement,” wrote Judge Rakoff.
“After the Goods dismissed their suit, Barnett continued releasing music under the name ‘FKA twigs.’ Yet the Goods did not take any action until 2024 and did not bring the instant claims until 2026.
In other words, the Goods let their claims lie fallow for at least a decade.” In trademark lawsuits, the laches doctrine does not apply to situations of “intentional” infringement.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.billboard.com — the content belongs to Billboard.
