Tresóna Files Amended ClicknClear False Advertising Lawsuit

Photo Credit: Yansi Keim

Right on cue, Tresóna Multimedia has fired off an amended false advertising lawsuit, including a fresh copyright infringement claim, against ClicknClear.

Scottsdale-based Tresóna submitted the retooled suit to a New York federal court yesterday, roughly nine months after filing its initial complaint against London’s ClicknClear (CnC). But much has transpired since the legal battle kicked off last summer.

That refers to a well-documented Winter Olympics music-clearance debacle involving ClicknClear and a subsequent DMN-exclusive deep dive into the “choreographed sports” licensing specialist’s operations. Therein, we explored pressing questions about the business’s public representations, core model, and financials.

Now, several of our findings are factoring into Tresóna’s amended suit, which follows the original iteration’s February dismissal.

As we reported then, the niche licensing companies had been clashing for years before things turned litigious. With an emphasis on their overlapping efforts to license “scholastic, community, and professional organizations,” Tresóna accused CnC of misleading the public with false statements about required licenses, making distinct “false or misleading statements about Tresóna’s products,” and more.

However, in dismissing the suit with leave to amend, Judge George B. Daniels found ClicknClear’s required-licensing remarks to be “non-actionable opinions of law” and underscored the absence of evidence demonstrating actual consumer confusion.

Consequently, Tresóna’s overhauled complaint has swapped some highly technical licensing details and descriptions of the underlying feud for hard examples of the alleged market confusion stemming from ClicknClear’s purported misrepresentations.

“ClicknClear’s false and deceptive tactics in advertising these two products and services, and the related copyright infringement it perpetrates in connection with those tactics, has resulted in widespread market confusion, harming consumers and Tresóna alike,” the amended action spells out, with the products and services referring to CnC’s License Verification System (LVS) and standard license.

As many will recall from our prior coverage, CnC maintains that the LVS enables one to upload “music and licenses to an event or season for checking and reporting of music use.” Touted as a one-stop means of ensuring compliance, the tool simply kicks back non-CnC licenses (among them those issued by Tresóna) as “unverified” or “unlicensed,” according to the plaintiff.

“Critically,” the text elaborates, “the LVS includes a prominent button labeled ‘Request License’ for consumers to purchase a ClicknClear license upon being informed by ClicknClear itself that their existing license is purportedly invalid, thereby attempting to convert the consumer to obtain a license through ClicknClear despite already possessing a valid license from Tresóna.

“In contrast, on the foregoing information and belief, ClicknClear licenses receive an automatic ‘green’ result from the LVS,” the document continues.

Per the suit, this is a big deal indeed for the rather compact licensing market in question – especially given CnC execs’ alleged aggressive push (constituting false advertising, in the filing party’s view) for various sports federations and governing bodies to adopt the tool.

That push has proven successful; the majority of CnC-partnered federations and bodies, we previously reported based on reviews of the relevant contracts, receive a 5% piece of their members’ licensing fees. At the intersection of both points, the complaint identifies multiple instances of individual consumer confusion on the educational side.

Two high school band directors, for example, are said to have separately “contacted Tresóna confused as to how to use the LVS to verify their Tresóna licenses after being unnecessarily and wrongfully required to do so” by the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association.

“[The LVS] is a tool created by a competitor to improperly obtain [ClicknClear’s] competitors’ licensing documentation and information and then convert its competitors’ customers to using its own services and products under false pretense,” per the complaint.

“Simply put, it is an illegitimate conversion and anti-competitive tool disguised as a legitimate document management tool with properties and abilities it does not and cannot possess.”

And as for CnC’s standard license, the company allegedly advertises the authorization as covering “the rights to ‘practise alone,’ ‘set choreography’ (the right to create choreography set to music), and ‘perform the routine in public’ (a dramatic performance or grand right).”

But the way Tresóna sees the situation, those claims “are literally false as ClicknClear cannot and does not offer such rights in its standard license, and are misleading to consumers.”

(A bit more context: “the majority of publishers do not license grand or dramatic performance rights to ClicknClear,” per Tresóna.)

Of course, some of the relevant consumers have purportedly pivoted to CnC as a result of the alleged false advertising.

Regarding the aforementioned copyright infringement claim, Tresóna says its in-house license agreement and certificate “constitute original works of which Tresóna is both the author and owner.”

And after being uploaded via the License Verification System at CnC’s alleged insistence, the “original works” at hand are allegedly being reproduced and displayed without permission.

At the time of this writing, ClicknClear didn’t seem to have publicly addressed the 54-page amended suit, which also touches on subjects like FloSports’ allegedly being “plainly confused” by the defendant’s licensing representations.

But these subjects will have to wait for future coverage; an all-encompassing account of the convoluted dispute would, without exaggeration, fill a book. For now, the above overview provides a decent look at where the case stands, and it’ll be worth continuing to track the courtroom confrontation from here.