4/13/2011

Michael Jackson Estate vs. Melissa Johnson - Updates

Updates in the above titled case:

- As an MJ Estate witness Karen Langford made a testify as well. She talked lot about MJ's past and things John Branca's testimony had. The most interesting part of her testimony was a list of companies whom MJ signed for manufacturing merchandises: Sony Signatures, MJ Net Entertainment, MJ Licensing LLC, AEG Live LLC (considering the cloud around MJ Licensing especially).

- Felix Sebacious made his statements on behalf of Bravado. He revealed that the first discussions between AEG and Bravado about the MJ themed merchandises started in March, 2009. Tom Bennett, president of Bravado personally presented MJ with the 300 items designed for his tour at Los Angeles. He says that since MJ's death they are serving as manufacturors as well they give the licensing rights to third parties with the prior consent of the MJ Estate. At the moment there are appr. 22 third party licenses for manufacturing MJ themed merchandises. Bravado blocked appr. 200.000 auctions on eBay since MJ's death due to copyright infrignment. Furthermore Bravado commenced more then 15 lawsuits against 50 defendants and seized over 7.500 items.
In August, 2009 Bravado even filed a lawsuit against Merrick Mint Inc. whom manufactured MJ coins based on a licensing agreement made with Johnson.
Since MJ's death more than 9 figures in retail dollar value of authorised, official MJ merchandises has been sold.

- Jeffrey Smith from Greenberg Traurig made a witness testify. Other than providing huge number of information on the MJ trademarks he didn't said anything new.

- Amongst the witnesses Evan S. Spiegel made his testify. He was the legal counsel of MJ between 1984 and 2005. He testified that Johnson has been reported by Evvy Tavasci in 2002 as harassing MJ and his family, employees. Like sending packages to MJ with Tavasci's return address on, or appearing at his home at Neverland. Johnson sent letters to Tavasci saying the she has been told by an "angel" that along with MJ she has to work on Heal The World Foundation. She furthermore stated the HTWF foundation won't go forward without her, and that someday, somehow she will work on that with MJ. After she has been threated by MJ's lawyers Johnson apologised but claimed that she won't stop reaching out to MJ.
Being frustrated Johnson started to collect MJ related domains and then selling them to MJJ. In June, 2003 MJJ decided to buy 850+ domain names from Johnson, in an agreement saying that she doesn't have any rights in the intellectual property.

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