Two years after Sylvester Stallone’s Sly magazine met its early demise on the newsstands, a New York judge has dismissed the trademark infringement claims of the publisher of an online magazine with the same name.
Sly, a fitness magazine aimed at men over 40, ceased publication after only four issues while slymagazine.com — which claims to be “for the quintessential woman” — has yet to publish a print edition. “The parties’ products will never appear side-by-side on the newsstand, so there will be nothing to confuse,” U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon said in this decision granting summary judgment to Sly publishers Weider Publications and American Media.
McMahon also found that any consumer confusion “stems from the fact that plaintiff elected to use the well-known nickname of a very famous actor to identify its product.”
Sly Magazine LLC, the online publisher, had been seeking $1 million in damages. Another judge denied injunctive relief when Sly’s Sly was still on newsstands, finding no likelihood of confusion between a “shoe fetish” publication and a fitness magazine for middle-aged men.
