Eric Church is taking legal action against unlicensed T-shirt vendors. He filed a lawsuit in federal court on Tuesday (March 10) to put a halt on illegal vendors selling Church-branded merchandise outside of his concerts.
According to Nashville’s Tennessean, Church is seeking an injunction that would order the vendors — named as Jane and Jon Does — to stop selling the knockoff goods, which are similar to the properly-licensed shirts Church sells at his shows, but the quality is inferior. He is also seeking damages from the vendors.
Church and his team have encountered several of these vendors before. They filed a similar lawsuit in 2012 that sought to put an end to the merch bootleggers, noting at the time, “Without a federal court order authorizing the seizure of infringing goods at and near … 2012 tour concert locations, [Church] will lose innumerable and irrecoverable sums in merchandise sales and will suffer incalculable, irreparable damage to his reputation and goodwill.”
The singer’s 2015 Outsiders World Tour is certainly no stranger to this type of frowned-upon activity. Church and his manager, Fielding Logan, have applied aggressive anti-scalping measures for his shows, using a combination of paperless tickets, ticket limits and purchase order sweeps to combat scalpers and bots. He has vocally fought against ticket scalpers, even going as far to cancel 1,000 tickets that scalpers had purchased, re-routing the tickets back into the hands of fans.
“A lot of acts just want to sell as many tickets as they can, and they don’t care who they sell them to,” he explains. “I want my fans to be the ones who buy tickets to my shows, and I want scalpers to back off. I can’t stop ticket scalpers completely, but I can definitely make it harder for them.”
