Fuct™ is officially a thing. The iconic streetwear brand’s near-decade-long legal battle ended with a Supreme Court win, allowing them to immediately obtain the federal trademark they were previously denied.
As reported by GQ, the court ruled in a 6-3 decision on Monday that “a federal ban on registration of immoral or scandalous trademarks violates the First Amendment,” with Justices Kagan, Ginsburg, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh forming the majority.
Delivered by Kagan, the majority opinion stated that, “The government may not discriminate against speech based on the ideas or opinions it conveys,” which is a huge win for Fuct and its founder Erik Brunetti, and, according to the ACLU, a “victory for the First Amendment.”
But because these things never really are, this one isn’t all the way over yet. While the “ideologically diverse majority” — made up of two liberal-leaning and four conservative-leaning justices — delivered a strong opinion, the story noted that there was room for reversal.
In his concurring opinion, Justice Alito wrote that the “decision does not prevent Congress from adopting a more carefully focused statute that precludes the registration of marks containing vulgar terms that play no real part in the expression of ideas,” and that Fuct “could be denied registration under such a statute.”
Until then, however, this has to go down as one of the weirder SCOTUS cases. A former graffiti artist skater and Stussy’s in-house attorney, John Sommer, challenged the US Patent and Trademark Office in the nation’s highest court and got four of the most conservative judges on the bench to agree with their arguments.
Fuct yeah!
You can read more about it at GQ Style.
