Kanye West’s lawsuit against Australian burger bar dropped after he goes AWOL
Kanye West’s lawsuit against an Australian burger bar has been dropped after the rapper stopped replying to communications from the space’s lawyers.
West filed the suit last year, claiming Victoria burger joint College Dropout Burgers and its owner Mark Elkhouri were using the name of his 2004 album ‘The College Dropout’ without his permission. The star also alleged that the branding constituted misleading and deceptive conduct.
However, according to WAtoday, the lawsuit has now been dropped after the rapper became unreachable. Elkhouri’s lawyers told a court on Friday (February 10) that the star had not responded to any of their attempts at communication with regard to securing legal costs before the case got underway.
“The applicant has taken a single substantive step so far in this proceeding, which is to initiate it… and then nothing since then,” lawyer Craig Smith said. “None of the various requests… none of those have been answered with any substance.”
(@collegedropoutburgers)The lawsuit, which was filed in October, claimed that being associated with the restaurant would cause loss and damages to West’s brand. “Ye has suffered, and will continue to suffer, loss and damage,” the document read. “Ye has sold more than 140 million records internationally and is one of the best-selling artists of all time.”
Elkhouri was first given a cease-and-desist letter in February 2021 from West, five months before the burger bar opened. After he continued with plans for the restaurant – which features a logo based on the bear from the cover of ‘The College Dropout’ – West sent a second cease-and-desist notice in June 2021.
In the latter, West asked the owner to change the names of menu items such as their Golddigger, Good Morning, Cheezus and Parties in L.A. burger, paint over a mural of the star, and get rid of its logo. Elkhouri announced that he would be complying with the “removal of all references to Ye” and said the restaurant would “no longer assert that we are directly inspired by Ye or his music”.
Although the cease-and-desist allowed Elkhouri to continue using the College Dropout name, West was reportedly still upset at the restaurant’s moniker and silhouettes of the Dropout Bear being used online. He then filed the lawsuit, seeking a permanent injunction barring Elkhouri from insinuating in any way that his restaurant or its offerings are sponsored or approved by, or affiliated with West.
Yesterday (February 14), it was reported that West’s antisemitic rants were linked to 30 different hate incidents in the US. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) shared a report that claimed to show the direct link between the rapper’s comments and attacks of various kinds on Jewish people.
“These incidents – which include vandalism, banner drops, targeted harassment and campus propaganda distributions – demonstrate the ongoing influence of Ye’s conspiratorial, bigoted rants,” the ADL wrote in the report.
It continued that “immediately following Ye’s antisemitic comments,” which included “inflammatory tropes about Jewish power and Holocaust denial”, the slogan ‘Ye is Right’ surfaced online in hashtags and anti-semitic accounts.
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Rhian Daly
NME
