Facebook
Fark
Digg
Reddit
StumbleFriday
25 November 2011
9:38 a.m.
A Las Vegas nightclub owner has filed a lawsuit against a competitor alleging trademark infringement.
Manhattan West LLC, owner of the Piranha Night Club and 8 1/2 Ultra Lounge, filed suit Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas against Krave Entertainment LLC, Phantom Entertainment LLC and other defendants associated with Krave nightclub.
Piranha and 8 1/2 complained in the lawsuit that the defendants in December 2010 registered the website domain name piranhalv.com.
That domain name redirects website users to the Krave website.
“Plaintiff has for many years done business under the names Piranha Night Club and 8 1/2 Ultra Lounge and has obtained common law trademark ownership and rights in these names,” the lawsuit says. “Plaintiff has further spent enormous amounts of time and money developing and marketing these brands in the local market and national market in print, broadcast media and the Internet.
“By registering the domain name piranhalv.com, the defendants were and are attempting to trade on the goodwill and business of the plaintiff."
Manhattan West LLC accuses the defendants of trademark infringement, violating the federal Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act and unfair and fraudulent business practices
Krave, Piranha and 8 1/2 are all prominent local gay clubs, and the lawsuit claims the Krave defendants registered the Piranha website domain name as part of a scheme “to wrongfully create the false belief among countless prospective, current and past customers that the plaintiff’s business is either merged with the defendants’ business or is out of business.”
A request for comment on the allegations was placed with Krave.
The lawsuit says one of the defendants, Phantom Entertainment, became the owner and operator of Krave when it purchased substantially all of the assets of Krave Entertainment out of the 2010 Krave bankruptcy .
Manhattan West filed its own bankruptcy last month. Another gay club associated with Manhattan West, Gipsy, is not part of the bankruptcy.
Share
Discussion 1 comment
Comments are moderated by VegasInc editors. Our goal is not to limit the discussion, but rather to elevate it. Comments should be relevant and contain no abusive language. Comments that are off-topic, vulgar, profane or include personal attacks will be removed. Full comments policy.
Additionally, we now display comments from trusted commenters by default. Those wishing to become a trusted commenter need to verify their identity or sign in with Facebook Connect to tie their Facebook account to their VEGAS INC account. For more on this change, read our story about how it works and why we did it.
Only trusted comments are displayed on this page. Untrusted comments have expired from this story.
Post a comment
Commenting requires registration.
If you have a LasVegasSun.com account, you are already registered.
My opinion? The Piranha guys should have realized this could happen and bought the website long before this. Now it's going to cost them a fortune to get it....Simple business common sense.