Outkast’slawsuit against Ovrkast asks how much difference a few letters make. The duo’s trademark company argues that the younger rapper’s name is confusingly similar to theirs. Rebecca Tushnet, a Harvard Law professor who studies trademark law, isn’t
convinced.
“I’m sort of skeptical of the underlying claim in part because both of these words, when spelled correctly, are completely standard English words with very different meanings,” she tells Rolling Stone. “And I don’t think that you want that level of monopoly over potential performance names.”
High Schoolers LLC, the company controlled by André 3000 and Big Boi, sued Ovrkast, born Silas Wilson, on Sept. 16. In addition to alleging Wilson infringed on Outkast’s trademark, the complaint alleges that he’d already agreed to a name change in July. The complaint acknowledges that Wilson never signed any agreement, and Ovrkast has similarly denied signing any formal agreement.
For Tushnet, who read the complaint before the interview, that alleged agreement could determine the outcome regardless of the names’ similarity. “So obviously I do not know the underlying facts,” she says. “So if they did have basically a full agreement, then it doesn’t necessarily matter what the trademark law is.”
Lawyers for Outkast cite a 2025 Rolling Stone interview where Ovrkast says people sometimes misread his name as Outkast. “The worst thing I get is like, ‘The nigga think he Outkast.’ It’s like, ‘No, bro. I wasn’t even thinking about Outkast,’ he said at the time. Tushnet would want to know what happened after these hypothetical fans made that mistake. In the face of the law, a fan misreading an article is different from a promoter booking the wrong performer.
“So basically consumers are required to be reasonable,” she says. “And what that means is determined case by case.”
Outkast’s company would need to establish a likelihood of legally relevant confusion. It wouldn’t necessarily have to produce someone who bought the wrong concert ticket, but finding one confused person wouldn’t automatically prove its case, either. “Because there’s always some unreasonable person somewhere, actual confusion is neither required nor necessarily sufficient,” Tushnet says. “On the other hand, if there is some actual confusion, that can be important.”
For a smaller artist, getting a court to consider those arguments can be expensive. Asked what defending a case like this through a decision on the merits could cost, Tushnet estimates: “Yeah, six figures unquestionably, possibly closer to seven, depending on how it’s litigated.” (Representatives for Outkast and Ovrkast declined to comment.)
A name change requires work, too. Metadata attached to individual releases on platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and TIdal all need to be updated when an artist changes their name. That can be as simple as changing each release through the company that delivered it, but an artist whose music is spread across a bunch of different labels or distributors may need to contact each of them individually. Then there are features and production credits (Ovrkast, for instance, recently produced a song from Drake’s Iceman) that the artist will have to track down the rights owner and distributors for to update the data. Depending on an artist’s resources, processing across services, labels, and distributors can take a few weeks or a few months.
Defenders of lawsuits like these point to the fact that, as harsh as it may seem, rights holders simply must protect their name to avoid losing their rights altogether. Waiting too long could prevent Outkast’s company from challenging this particular use, Tushnet explains, without costing it the trademark itself. “So the trademark owners like to say this because it means, ‘Don’t blame me, blame the trademark system,’” she says. “That’s just not entirely true.”
An artist’s conduct can affect the remedy, too. Tushnet says courts may be more accommodating toward someone who has made good-faith efforts to prevent confusion than someone who kept investing in a name despite knowing there was a problem.
Hip-hop’s tradition of borrowing and reinterpreting names presents another argument. Would explaining that creative practice help an artist in court?
“It hasn’t historically been very effective to say that,” Tushnet says. Recalling a scholar’s observation, she adds that “historically courts haven’t been super interested in hearing Black men talk about why they created things.”
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