Rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, his G-Unit businesses, Lions Gate and STARZ were slapped with a trademark lawsuit from Bryon Belin for the rapper’s show using the acronym BMF for his show, “Black Mafia Family,” a show about a real-life drug dealing and money laundering organization, aka BMF. The lawsuit was filed in December 2021.
According to the suit, Belin claimed that he owned the rights to the trademark BMF since he has used it since 2017 to market and sell TV services. The show, on the other hand, premiered in September 2021 and gained a lot of success, which is why Belin argued in the lawsuit that Jackson and STARZ using the acronym “BMF” is “unfair competition, false designation of origin, trademark counterfeiting, and false advertising, among other additional claims.”
Jackson and his legal team requested that the lawsuit be dismissed, arguing that the acronym is associated with the show since it’s the acronym for Black Mafia Family. They also argued that they were using the acronym for expressive work, which fell under the Rogers Test, which only applies if the use involved expressive work.
This month, Belin filed a First Amended Complaint, which states that the use of the trademark is “explicitly misleading.” Pulling that card requires Belin to have the proof for confirmation. He would need to validate that he possesses a “valid, protectable trademark” and prove that using the acronym isn’t “artistically relevant to the underlying work or explicitly misleading as to the source or content of the work.”
Belin also alleged in the lawsuit that he has items associated with the BMF acronym. If Belin fails to prove his claim that he has those items, he risks losing his use of the trademark, throwing a win at Jackson and his team.
Season two of Black Mafia Family premieres in September 2022.
