my dude, Coke is generic. in the steel industry. there are hundreds if not thousands of coke companies. In the food industry? If there are more than one Coke company, they are subsidiaries of the Coca Cola Company.

They got the trademark as soon as they started marketing their band. They may not have registered the trademark until 2022. Things like trademarks and copyright are implicit to the creator. Registering them just makes it easier for others to find your work and deter infringement and makes filing some paperwork, namely lawsuits, much easier.

This seems to be a bit mixed in reporting.

Seems like it depends on what the outlet wants to spin.

One article cited the trademark for recorded music and merchandise in 2022, but vaguely said there was a separate trademark for performance, but that was left unspecified. That article seemed to want to induce a narrative of opportunistic trademark, but even then that's perhaps a bit of a stretch as they wouldn't have known it would have gone down as a media sensation that soon, though it had been announced as a thing.

However, another article explained that the performance trademark was registered in 2014. That is pretty unambiguously way before Netflix would have even had it as a thought.

Their case is shit, its frankly a miracle they were even able to trademark “Demon Hunters” because it’s so generic. I see this going nowhere.

How many band names would not be considered generic independent of context? The Cure is trademarked, R.E.M. is trademarked, Queen is trademarked... Famously Apple computers ran up against Apple records trademark and it was deemed both ok for Apple Computer to continue without declaring it genericized, just that they were trademark in their respective markets. Until iTunes, then Apple had to change the arrangement.

Yet Apple has Apple. Trademarks are about markets. You can make a purse called Apple but you cant make computer hardware or software called apple without at least a C&D from Apple. Demon Hunters is so less generic than Apple and they probably only have it in music and maybe visual arts because of music videos.

Trademark law is all about how much the target market overlaps. Since they are a band and the movie is about a fictional band, they might have something

Demon hunters is not generic. It doesn’t work the way you think. I hold a few trademarks.

its frankly a miracle they were even able to trademark “Demon Hunters” because it’s so generic

Far easier than you'd think. The patent office is understaffed and the rules for this kind of thing are fairly loose.

The movie title is referring to a fictional band, so even if you google “demon hunters band” you’re almost certainly going to get K-Pop Demon Hunters nowadays. I wouldn’t even know how to search for them and reliably get them to show up.

…well except this news story has gone viral so now they DO show up on top. The internet is weird man.

You are right, but this isn't a video game versus a grocery store chain comparison here. It's a real life band vs a movie of a fictional band. The question of trademark infringement is not necessarily even about direct competition or intentional use. It is about whether a reasonable consumer of their product might confuse the two names/logos.

Were the movie just about some typical warriors fighting demons and otherwise just sharing a similar name, I doubt that they would have much of a case due to lack of overlap. But as the film is about a band (even if the band itself has a different name), and the actual soundtrack for this fictional band is immensely popular and carries the film name, and they're selling live shows with the artists who created the actual music under the same name. I think they could make a really good case about consumer confusion.

Edit: They even demonstrate actual consumer confusion that has already occurred in their court filing.

To prove their point, included in the filing is an email from a person who spent $500 on top-tier tickets to a Demon Hunter concert in Albany, thinking they were purchasing admission to a KPop Demon Hunters event for their children, aged five and six.

It’s hilarious that you use Apple as an example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer

I did. Court would be a coin toss. They'll settle.

The title is a little misleading, Google searches aren't involved, that was colour added by the author

Netflix is the distributor. They do approve the title it's sold under.

It's not about the search rankings directly, that's just a signal of the effect of the trademark dilution for the band. It's proof of the damage.