Hyde Lane, Inc., a corporation based in Washington DC that owns and operates the band Demon Hunter, filed a complaint on 18 August 2026 in the United States District Court for the Central District of California against Netflix, Inc., Netflix Studios, LLC and AEG Presents, LLC. The band Demon Hunter formed in Seattle in 2000, and their complaint pleads twelve studio albums, more than 300 major concerts, more than a million albums and their streaming equivalent sold in the United States, two Grammy nominations and about 350,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. It describes a working band of 25 years’ standing, well known to its core audience, but largely unknown beyond them.
KPop Demon Hunters was released on 20 June 2025 and occupies first place on Netflix’s all-time film rankings with 325.1 million views in its first 91 days. It passed 500 million views in December and won two Academy Awards on 15 March 2026, for best animated feature and for best original song for “Golden”. In Australia, the soundtrack was the biggest chart-topper from an animated film since the ARIA charts began in 1983, and ARIA’s end-of-year figures put “Golden” second among 2025’s singles and the soundtrack second among its albums. Netflix sells the film’s clothing, posters and collectibles through its own shop, and on 13 May 2026 Netflix and AEG announced a global concert tour, put by the complaint at about 150 cities, none yet named.
The complaint
The complaint pleads the following causes of action:
Infringement of registered trade marks under s 32 of the Lanham Act, the United States trade mark statute, brought against the two Netflix companies.
False designation of origin under s 43(a), which protects unregistered rights and is brought against all three defendants, including the tour promoter.
The third and fourth are unfair competition claims under California statute and common law.
Every count turns on the same underlying question, familiar in substance to Australian law, of what the defendant’s use of the name is likely to make consumers believe about source, sponsorship or affiliation.
Both the band and the parties responsible for the show have cause for concern. The ordinary direction, a consumer buying the defendant’s product believing it to be the plaintiff’s, appears in the complaint through a parent who wrote to the band on 26 February 2026 after spending almost $500 on tickets to a Demon Hunter show in Albany, New York, in the belief that it was a “child friendly” KPop Demon Hunters event. The greater harm pleaded flows in the opposite direction. In what American courts call reverse confusion, where a later user grows so large that the public assumes the earlier, smaller user is the imitator. The complaint pleads that “KPOP DEMON HUNTERS subsumes the entire DEMON HUNTER mark”, that a producer for the television program Inside Edition emailed the band’s manager on 16 March 2026 seeking an interview with one of the film’s songwriters, that searches for “demon hunter” on Ticketmaster and Google now surface the film ahead of the band, and that heavy metal covers of the film’s songs, with millions of views, blur the line between a metal band and a pop franchise. On the band’s account the result is a brand facing “an existential crisis”.
The complaint also confronts the objection that the film’s name simply describes its subject. “KPop”, it pleads, names a genre in the way “rock” or “jazz” does, and adding a genre word to another act’s registered name does not create a new one. “Simply put,” the complaint reads, “Netflix is no more entitled to use the mark KPOP DEMON HUNTERS than it would be to launch a recording artist, live touring show and merchandise under the marks KPOP METALLICA, KPOP U2 or KPOP BLACK SABBATH.”
Hyde Lane seeks injunctions in respect of recordings, merchandise and live entertainment, an order that the Trademark Office refuse or cancel Netflix’s applications, disgorgement of profits, treble damages and corrective advertising. Netflix said in a statement on 20 August that “these allegations are without merit” and that it looks forward “to vigorously defending this matter”. No defence has been filed, no court has considered the claims, and so the allegations remain untested.
But what about the register?
Demon Hunter (the band) has used its name since 2001, but its first trade mark registration was much later. The band registered DEMON HUNTER for live performances in August 2014, and for recordings, posters and clothing only in January 2022, on applications filed in 2021. In the United States, a trade mark registration is maintained only if the owner files periodic declarations of continued use, with a combined declaration and renewal due every ten years, and a registration lapses automatically if they are missed. The band’s live performance registration was cancelled on 28 February 2025 for what the complaint concedes was “an inadvertent failure to timely file” those declarations. KPop Demon Hunters was released sixteen weeks later.
Netflix Studios’ filed its first United States application for KPOP DEMON HUNTERS, for plush toys, on 22 July 2025, five weeks after the film’s release, and that application became a granted registration on 21 July 2026. It filed in the United Kingdom the following day. It has since filed ten United States applications across seven classes of goods and services, from cosmetics and homewares to recorded media, and on 7 November 2025 it filed for entertainment services, a specification that includes live musical performances and concerts, the services a band sells. Demon Hunter applied to re-register its own name for those services on 13 December 2025, five weeks behind. American rights ultimately rest on use in commerce, so the bands common law rights and its three surviving registrations survive the lapse in registration. But what the lapse does cost them is the statutory advantages of registration for the services most directly connected to the dispute, and their earlier place in the registration queue. The complaint notes, for completeness, that Netflix itself sued a group of counterfeit merchandise sellers in Illinois in April 2026 to enforce the same name it is now accused of taking.
Why does this matter for Australian bands?
Trade marks are territorial. Registration of a trade mark in Australia gives its owner, under s 20 of the Trade Marks Act 1995 (Cth), the exclusive right to use that mark, and to authorise others to use it, for the registered goods and services in Australia. Because such a registration is confined to Australia, registering in the United States gives the owner less protection here. Every country keeps its own register, and a name that is protected in one can be open, or already taken, in the next. The question a 150-city tour poses is which national trade mark registers the show will be governed by. Nothing in this article turns on the current state of the Australian register, and any Australian advice on a prospective trade mark would begin with a search of it, but the framework below is the one those facts would need to meet.
An Australian band without a trade mark registration
A band that has never registered its name as a trade mark is not without rights in Australia, though the nature and extent of those rights differs subject to the registration of a mark.
The first is the tort of passing off
This protects the goodwill a trader has built in a name against a misrepresentation, express or implied, that another trader’s goods, services or business are those of the first, or are connected with them, where that misrepresentation causes damage. Reputation, misrepresentation and damage each have to be proved. The second is the Australian Consumer Law, which prohibits conduct in trade or commerce that is misleading or deceptive or likely to mislead or deceive under s 18, and false or misleading representations that goods or services have a sponsorship or approval they do not have, or that the person making them has a sponsorship, approval or affiliation they do not have, under s 29. These claims are often brought together, and although neither requires a registration, proving them in a dispute can be more costly.
Both, however, require an Australian reputation. The Full Federal Court held in ConAgra v McCain (1992) 33 FCR 302 that a foreign trader need not carry on business in Australia to sue in passing off, but must show that a substantial number of people here know its name and associate it with the trader. That reputation can be proven with evidence, of Australian sales and streams, Australian touring, Australian press, and proving it involves a cost, in lawyers, in preparation and in time. For a niche or emerging act asserting rights against a franchise whose soundtrack led the ARIA chart, the difficulty is that the misrepresentation analysis would be conducted in a market the newcomer has saturated. Australian law has no separate doctrine of reverse confusion, but the same substance can be pleaded here, since a use that leads consumers to assume the older act is trading on the newer franchise could mislead just as surely as the reverse. Although a band may be able to use these avenues to protect its name without a registration, it loses a headstart, because it needs to prove the existence of a reputation the other side would dispute.
An Australian band with a registration
A trade mark is defined by s 17 as a sign used, or intended to be used, to distinguish one trader’s goods or services from another’s, a badge of origin. Under s 120(1), a person infringes a registered mark by using as a trade mark a sign that is substantially identical with, or deceptively similar to, it, in relation to the registered goods or services. Under s 120(2) infringement extends to goods and services of the same description as, or closely related to, the registered ones, subject to a proviso that lets the defendant escape by proving its use is not likely to deceive or cause confusion. Under s 120(3) a mark that is well known in Australia can be infringed even on unrelated goods, a provision that in this scenario would assist the franchise, not the band.
A sign is deceptively similar under s 10 if it so nearly resembles the registered mark that it is likely to deceive or cause confusion, judged by the imperfect recollection of an ordinary consumer, and the High Court framed the test in Self Care v Allergan around a notional buyer left “likely to wonder” about a common trade source.
Per Self Care the reputation of the registered mark is not part of the comparison under s 120(1). The court compares the marks as marks, for the goods and services on the certificate, and the fact that one party is a global platform and the other a band with a more localised presence is beside the point of that comparison. A band holding an Australian registration for DEMON HUNTER in respect of recordings, clothing and live performances would not need to prove that a single Australian had heard of it. It would put KPOP DEMON HUNTERS beside DEMON HUNTER for the same goods and services and support an argument of resemblance and likely confusion, with the evidentiary burden on the proviso resting on the defendant for similar goods. Registration, in other words, substitutes a certificate for the cost of evidencing a reputation capable of infringement, which is precisely the asset a small act lacks and a franchise does not need.
There are two qualifications of relevance:
The infringing use must be use as a trade mark, a use that presents the sign as a badge of origin, and Self Care shows us that the threshold has significance, since the phrase “instant Botox alternative” was held there not to be trade mark use at all. A defendant film-maker will argue that a title names a work rather than branding a trader. That argument becomes increasingly difficult to substantiate as a title migrates from a single work to a franchise, onto T-shirts, records and the gates of an arena tour, where the name functions in exactly the way s 17 describes, but it is an argument a court would hear.
The Act supplies defences, narrow ones, including good-faith use by a person of their own name under s 122 and, under s 124, continuous use of the sign in Australia that predates the registered owner’s priority date or first Australian use.
Neither would help a newcomer that adopted its name in 2025 against an owner whose rights predate it, and neither helps an overseas band that never used its name in Australia at all.
The remedies under s 126 are injunctions and, at the owner’s option, damages or an account of the infringer’s profits, with additional damages available for flagrancy.
Registration provides further procedural advantages beyond a dispute. Every accepted application is advertised for a two-month opposition window, and an earlier owner may oppose a conflicting application on grounds including a substantially identical or deceptively similar earlier mark under s 44, an established Australian reputation under s 60, ownership under s 58 and bad faith under s 62A, which is a far cheaper forum for a dispute. A registered owner can also lodge a Notice of Objection with the Australian Border Force, valid for four years, under which imported goods bearing an infringing mark can be seized at the border, a remedy of material value to touring acts whose merchandise is counterfeited. It is important to note that the Act gives recipients of unjustified demands their own cause of action for groundless threats under s 129, so a band that wants to enforce should always take advice before doing so.
Who in a band owns the trade mark?
Under s 27, a person may apply to register a trade mark only if the person claims to be the owner of the mark and is using it, or intends to use it, or intends to authorise its use. For an unregistered name, the owner at common law is the first user of the mark in Australia for the relevant goods or services. For a band, that is ordinarily the members who were performing under the name when it was first used, together, and between them the name is an asset of their partnership. IP Australia’s practice reflects this, since a partnership has no legal personality and an application must be made in the names of the partners jointly, or by a company that holds the band’s business.
It is much simpler to address this matter when applying for a trade mark, rather than when a dispute arises later. In Pham Global v Insight Clinical Imaging the Full Federal Court held that an application filed by someone who was not the owner at the filing date is invalid, and that a later assignment to the true owner cannot resolve it. An application by one member for a name the whole band owns could therefore be a grounds for opposition under s 58 on the basis that the applicant is not the true owner, and even after registration the same defect can support cancellation under s 88. This issue of ownership does not expire, which is why Australian disputes over band names can surface decades after the filings that seeded them.
Australian disputes
Little River Band’s name was registered for entertainment services to We Two Pty Ltd, a company to which the name had been transferred in the late 1980s and which by the late 1990s belonged solely to Stephen Housden, a guitarist who joined the band in 1981. When the founders Glenn Shorrock, Beeb Birtles and Graeham Goble performed in 2002 under their own names with the tag “The Original Little River Band”, We Two sued for infringement. The founders attacked the registration for non-use, abandoned that attack on the second day of trial, and settled on terms that they would not use the name or marks as their band name and could refer to their history “prominently but always only in a descriptive way”. Justice Finkelstein, ordering them to pay half of We Two’s costs, observed that “if the case had gone to judgment, We Two could well have succeeded” (We Two Pty Ltd v Shorrock [2002] FCA 875). The men who sang the hits went on to tour as Birtles Shorrock Goble.
Taxiride’s registration, held by a company associated with the band from 1999, lapsed in 2019. In October 2021 two members, Tim Watson and Tim Wild, applied to register TAXIRIDE in their own names for recordings, clothing and live performances. The singer, Jason Singh, opposed under s 58, and in February 2024 a delegate of the Registrar refused the application. “There is clear evidence that the Opponent and the Applicants jointly owned and used the Trade Mark for many years,” she found, and the name and “any other assets of the partnership are still jointly held by the individuals and cannot simply be seized” (Jason Singh v Tim Watson & Tim Wild [2024] ATMO 33). Singh described the experience as “an unnecessary, costly, two-and-a-half-year battle”.
Australian Crawl’s name was registered for entertainment services in 1990 and for clothing in 1994 by Bill McDonough, a drummer the founders say the band voted out in 1983. James Reyne and Simon Binks say no one in the band was consulted, and on 12 March 2026 they applied to the Federal Court to challenge his ownership of the marks. Their manager, Scot Crawford, has said the action “is not about stripping Bill of these trademarks” but about the original members having access to registration “individually or in partnership”. In June the band announced its first shows under the name in 40 years, with Men at Work in October and November. The proceeding is on foot and unresolved, and the band will tour with its name in dispute.
In each of these disputes, a name was used for years by people who never recorded who owned it, a registration was filed, or lapsed, or sat in one person’s hands, and the dispute arose far from when the name was first developed.
Should a band register its name?
The law does not require trade mark registration, and a band that plays occasionally as a hobby may reasonably keep its money. For any act that releases recordings, sells merchandise or tours, the analysis favours seeking advice on registration in most cases.
A registration is statutory property in the name from the filing date, for the whole of Australia, for ten years at a time, renewable indefinitely, and independent of reputation. The official fees are $250 a class for an application using IP Australia’s pick list of goods and services, or $400 a class otherwise. The classes with particular relevance to most bands are class 9 for recordings and downloads, class 41 for live performances and entertainment services, and class 25 for clothing, so often times official fees of $750 can cover the core of a band’s trade, before any professional fees. Corner Soul can provide clearance searches and advice in respect to a trade mark before filing a registration application. Examination takes three to four months, an accepted application is advertised for two months for oppositions, and registration takes at least seven months from the filing date. Renewal costs $400 a class each decade, with a six-month grace period after expiry at $100 a month a class, after which the registration is removed.
One of the salient difference between the Australian and American systems is that of maintenance, which has particular relevance to the Demon Hunter story. In Australia, declarations of use are not formally required to review a registration, only a payment to renew, so the failure that cost Demon Hunter its live performance registration would be less likely to occur in that same way. The counterweight is non-use removal. Once three years have passed since a mark was entered on the Register, anyone may apply to remove it for the goods or services on which it has not been used in good faith for a continuous three-year period ending a month before the application, and the owner must respond by proving their active use of it. A band should register the classes it genuinely trades in, keep evidence of that trade, and not register when it does not legitimately own or use it.
Some of the limitations for registered trade marks
A registration protects the registered goods and services, so a band registered only for live performances holds a weaker hand against unauthorised T-shirts.
It protects Australia only. Copyright offers nothing here, since names and titles are too short and unoriginal for copyright to protect, and the administrative registers do not help either.
An ASIC business name, a domain name or a social media handle identifies you, but gives no exclusive right to the name itself.
Not every name will qualify. One that only describes the style of music may fail the distinctiveness requirement in s 41, and a name too similar to an earlier registration in the same classes may be subject to challenge under s 44.
The Demon Hunter story also provides us with a defensive reason for registering a trade mark. Registration is examined against earlier applications, so the band that files first occupies the ground, and everyone later must file around it, oppose, or negotiate. A band that never registers leaves its name available for someone else to claim, a former member, a merchandiser, a promoter, or an unrelated business, and if that later applicant achieves registration, the band can find itself needing defences to trade under its own name. The prior use defence in s 124 protects use in Australia that predates the registration, so an established Australian band is rarely silenced outright, but the burden of proving that history in a dispute is the cost that timely registration can avoid.
When should I trade mark my band’s name?
The filing date is the priority date, so typically a band should register their name as soon as they start using it, before the name is worth anything to anyone else.
A non-exaustive list of opportunities to consider registering
Before the first release, tour announcement or merchandise run, since announcements are read by more than fans, and a filing made the week before an announcement costs the same as one made the week after but ranks ahead of whatever the announcement provokes. Demon Hunter’s replacement application for live performances stands five weeks behind Netflix’s because of the order in which they were filed.
The second is before signing recording, management, merchandising or distribution agreements, which routinely deal with the artist’s name, sometimes as a licence, sometimes as an assignment, sometimes as a right to register it. A band that already owns its registration licenses the name on its own terms and takes it back when the deal ends.
The first line-up change or the first significant money, whichever comes first, and this moment calls for a band agreement more than a filing, because it is the moment ownership stops being obvious.
Every tenth anniversary of the filing date. Taxiride’s registration lapsed in 2019 and the next applicants for the name were two of its own members.
The day someone else files. Accepted applications are advertised for two months, and watch service on the name can be done for little cost, and an opposition before the Registrar is typically measured in the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, where a Federal Court proceeding is commonly measured in the hundreds of thousands.
Who should own the band’s trade mark?
The ownership decision should be made before the application is filed, in writing, because Pham Global shows us a wrong answer cannot be corrected later. Bands commonly consider two structures in particular. The members can hold the registration jointly, in all their names, which matches the partnership that typically exists at law anyway. Or a company controlled by the band can hold it, which is cleaner for a long-lived act, since members can come and go as shareholders and directors without any change to the registration itself, and labels, promoters and merchandisers can take their licences from a single entity.
Either structure works only as well as the agreement governing it. A band agreement should record who owns the name, what happens to it when a member leaves or dies, what a departing member may call themselves, how a departing share is valued, and who has authority to license the name to labels, merchandisers and promoters, since a licence granted by one member without the others is where several of the disputes above began. The Little River Band settlement shows us what the end state looks like when this is left unresolved for decades: founding members entitled to describe their history but not to perform under the name they founded.
What bands, managers and labels can do now
1) Search before you commit to a name
Search Australian Trade Mark Search for the name and anything close to it in classes 9, 25 and 41, then the ASIC business names register, the domain registries, the streaming services and the social platforms. A descriptive name risks refusal under s 41, a name close to an earlier mark risks s 44, and a distinctive name is cheaper to protect than a clever one. TM Headstart buys an examiner’s preliminary view for $200 a class.
2) Decide who owns the name, and document it
The members jointly or a band company, recorded in a band agreement that deals with departures, death, valuation and licensing authority. An application in the wrong name is invalid and cannot be fixed by assignment afterwards.
3) File in the classes you trade in
Classes 9, 25 and 41 for most bands, adding class 16 for posters and printed goods and class 35 for online retail where merchandise is a business in its own right. Register the words rather than the logo, since a word mark protects the name in any styling, and add the logo later if budget allows. File before the announcement, not after it.
4) Read the deals you have signed
Find the clauses that touch the name in every recording, management, publishing, merchandising and distribution agreement, and establish who may register it, who may license it, and what happens when the term ends. New agreements should leave the registration with the band and grant the company a licence for the term.
5) Diarise the renewal and watch the register
Renewal falls due every ten years from filing, with a six-month grace period and then removal. Put the dates in more than one calendar and in the band agreement, and put a watch on the name so that a conflicting application is met with a two-month opposition rather than litigation. A lapsed registration sits at the start of both the Taxiride and Demon Hunter chronologies.
6) Plan for the territories you tour
The Madrid system extends an Australian application into its member countries, more than 128 of them including the United States, from a single filing. A United States registration then has to be kept alive with declarations of use on the American schedule, which is the step that caught Demon Hunter, so have your attorney diarise them. At home, a registered owner can lodge a Notice of Objection with the Australian Border Force so that counterfeit merchandise can be seized on import.
7) Take advice before you threaten
Section 129 gives the recipient of an unjustified infringement threat its own right to sue. Enforcement letters over band names are common, emotional and frequently misdirected at people with defences, so the letter should follow from legal advice, not precede it.
The Californian case will be decided, or more likely settled, on American law and American evidence, and nothing above assumes an outcome. Its usefulness to Australian artists lies in its paper trail, which is complete, public and unusually legible. A company with a film to protect filed in two countries within five weeks of release and across seven classes within months. A band with 25 years of use registered its name twelve years into its career, covered its merchandise two decades in, and let the registration nearest to its livelihood lapse four months before the collision. Australian bands have produced the same paper trail: in a Federal Court trial over Little River Band, a two-and-a-half-year opposition over Taxiride, and a proceeding over Australian Crawl filed weeks before the band’s first tour in 40 years. A band’s name is one of its assets that survives every line-up change, every deal and every hiatus. Registered with the right owner, in the right classes, at the right time, it is also one of the cheapest to keep.
If you would like advice on protecting your band’s name, or on what your existing agreements say about it, we would be glad to hear from you.
This article is general information, current at 30 September 2026. It is not legal advice, and must not be relied upon as such. No lawyer-client relationship is created by reading this article.
