Sick of It All suing Mobb Deep over Supreme collaboration
Sick of It All have sued Mobb Deep over their collaboration with Supreme, Billboard reports. The suit was filed on Friday, with Supreme owner Chapter 4 Corp, Havoc’s Kejuan Muchita Inc, and the estate of the late Prodigy, who passed away in 2017, named as defendents. It concerns the dragon design on Mobb Deep’s Supreme collaboration, which came out over the summer; the suit says it’s “virtually identical” to Sick of It All’s logo, which they’ve used since 1987. You can see the two side-by-side above.
Lawyers for Bush Baby Zamagate Inc., who control Sick of It All’s intellectual property, write, “This case arises out of defendants’ improper and illegal use of a nearly identical logo mark to plaintiff’s inherently distinctive, incontestable, and famous logo. Defendants’ adoption and use of their knockoff logo … is not just reckless and inexplicable — it is willful infringement and unfair competition.”
The suit also says that Sick of It All have been trying to stop Mobb Deep from using the design in question since 1997, including sending a cease-and-desist in 2003 over its appearance in an insert in Mobb Deep’s Free Agents: The Murda Mixtape.
Billboard points out that in a 2011 interview with Mishka NYC, Prodigy says he found the design on the wall of a tattoo parlor as a teenager. “Basically, when I was 14 or 15, there was this tattoo parlor in Elmart off Hemstead Turnpike and I had walked in there to get my first tattoo,” he said. “There was this dragon on the wall and I didn’t know what it was, I just thought it looked ill, I was mad young and I had always wanted something on my hand. I prolly seen it on some of those L.A. gang movies like Colors. I thought’d be cool, it’d look like some tough shit. So I told the dude put that on my hand. When me and Hav started Mobb Deep, we turned it into the lil clique thing.”
“We wanted to turn it into the logo for Mobb Deep,” Prodigy continued in the interview, “but, then we got a cease and desist letter in the mail…. That was just some random shit! We didn’t even know, we was just young kids.”