Note: This article first appeared on UncoverLA and is shared with their permission in partnership with Los Angeleno. You can subscribe to UncoverLA for local retail, fashion and lifestyle news here.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has spoken.
Remember Fred Segal’s O.G. outpost on Melrose Avenue? When the iconic Los Angeles retailer relocated to Sunset Boulevard three years ago, one thing it didn’t pack up was its original signage. Since then, Global Icons (the licensing agency that co-owns the Fred Segal brand) and CormackHill (the Canada-based real estate investor that owns the Melrose property) have been locked in legal battles over the rights to use the name.
Now, the matter has finally been settled in court. The verdict: The Fred Segal sign at the department boutique’s old location — aka the Melrose Center — must come down, reports Women’s Wear Daily. A decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (California’s highest federal court) rules that as a third-party purchaser, CormackHill cannot inherit the license to use the brand name from the family of Bud Brown, who sold the Melrose property to the retail real estate investing company.
Per the decision, the license agreement “expressly precludes third-party purchasers of the Center, like CormackHill, from succeeding to the License: if the Center is sold outside the Brown Family, ‘such transferee shall not succeed to the rights of [the]Licensee hereunder.’ The License is instead granted ‘only to the extent Licensee [the Brown Family] owns and operates such Center.'”