Six years ago, Nashville speaker company owner Alex Jacobsen began a legal battle to save the trademark of his grandfather’s beloved music equipment company, Auratone, from being taken by an international corporation.
Auratone’s hand-built audio speakers have been a staple for producers for decades, including for Quincy Jones, who used them to mix Michael Jackson’s legendary album Thriller, and Tom Elmhirst, who used them to produce albums by David Bowie and Adele.
The deep-pocketed company Music Tribe, however, began using the Auratone name and logo created in the 1950s by Jacobsen’s late grandfather, Jack Wilson. The effort to save the family business seemed hopeless until the Suffolk Law Intellectual Property (IP) and Entrepreneurship Clinic stepped in. Now Auratone will survive for a new generation of musicians.
“It would have been a struggle for Alex to fight this case through to its conclusion without the aid of a pro bono clinic and law students providing the legal representation,” says Professor Lolita Darden, director of Suffolk’s IP Clinic. “The students threw themselves into this extremely complex case and the results were gratifying—justice for a small business.”
When Auratone founder Jack Wilson died suddenly in 2005 in California, his daughters shipped company assets to Atlanta, cataloged inventory, and built an Auratone website, Darden says. After Jacobsen graduated from college in 2012, he was excited to continue the family tradition. He pored over his grandfather’s prototypes, reached out to distributors and suppliers, and fired up a new version of the website—but was gutted to discover that the trademark registration had lapsed and that Music Tribe had applied to take it over.
Still, Jacobsen pushed forward, introducing the new Auratone 5C and sharing those speakers with producer Elmhirst, who used them for albums with Lady Gaga and Beck. Even so, Jacobsen soon ran out of funding to fight the legal battle. Music Tribe’s legal case rested mainly on the idea that the Auratone trademark was abandoned.
Suffolk’s IP Clinic students stepped in to help Jacobsen prove that wasn’t so. They uncovered evidence of steps the family had taken to keep their interest in the Auratone trademark alive, Darden says, including design updates to modernize the mark, emails refusing to sell the company, and annual domain name renewals.
Over six years, students prepared testimony for presentation to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, argued motions before Judge William Young in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts, and defended depositions in Georgia, Nevada, and Tennessee. Finally, the students assisted in an arbitration proceeding in Colorado before the Honorable Jane Michaels, who ruled in favor of the Jacobsen family. The U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada affirmed the ruling in July.
“We didn’t have the big resources,” Jacobsen says, “but the clinic and I were all motivated by saving this company. The Auratone-brand speaker monitors mean a lot to people in the industry—they get emotional about it. It’s one of the most-used studio monitors in history, and we didn’t want that legacy to end.”
