Last year, the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado denied defendant National Geographic’s motion to dismiss claims that the titles of National Geographic’s nature docuseries infringed the title of the plaintiff’s nature docuseries. Stouffer v. Nat’l Geographic Partners, 400 F. Supp. 3d 1161 (D. Colo. 2019). Rather than applying the Second Circuit’s Rogers test to determine Lanham Act liability for a creative work, the court had announced a new, multifactor test (the “genuine artistic motive” test) and granted the parties leave to address its new test. National Geographic again moved to dismiss the plaintiff’s Lanham Act claims. Applying the genuine artistic motive test for the first time, the court granted National Geographic’s motion to dismiss, concluding that the First Amendment protected National Geographic’s docuseries titles.
