Panic! at the Disco Sues Online Sellers for Counterfeit Merchandise

Panic! at the Disco company sues online sellers over counterfeit merch

September 15, 2026 By Murray Stassen

Panic At The Disco LLC , the company that owns the trademarks of the band Panic! at the Disco , has sued a group of anonymous online sellers it accuses of selling counterfeit merchandise.

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The complaint was filed on September 8 in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

It names as defendants a set of e-commerce store operators identified only on a “Schedule A” filed under seal, who the company says use seller aliases to conceal their identities.

The suit brings two counts under the Lanham Act : trademark infringement and counterfeiting, and false designation of origin. You can read the filing in full here.

The New Jersey -headquartered company is seeking injunctive relief, an accounting of the sellers’ profits, and up to treble damages.

In the alternative, it asks for statutory damages of USD $2,000,000 “for each and every use” of its trademarks. US law caps statutory damages for willful counterfeiting at $2m per counterfeit mark per type of goods.

Panic At The Disco LLC says it filed the case to stop e-commerce store operators “who trade upon Plaintiff’s reputation and goodwill from further selling and/or offering for sale Unauthorized Products.”

The complaint says the products are offered on marketplace platforms including eBay , SHEIN , and Temu .

The sellers “attempt to avoid liability by operating under one or more Seller Aliases to conceal their identities, locations, and the full scope and interworking of their counterfeiting operation,” the Panic At The Disco LLC complaint adds.

US District Judge John J. Tharp Jr. granted the company’s motion to file parts of the case under seal on Thursday (September 10).

In the same order, he told Panic At The Disco LLC to file by September 19 a listing of all prior online trademark, copyright, or patent infringement cases “filed in any court in the United States in which it was a plaintiff.”

The company must also list any defendant named on the Schedule A in this case that it has sued before.

If it moves for a temporary restraining order, Judge Tharp wrote, the company “must provide evidence that sales actually took place in Illinois, including proof that the defendant shipped its products to the state … That evidence of purposefully directed activities is the bare minimum for establishing personal jurisdiction in schedule A cases.”

The order cites Liu v. Monthly , a Seventh Circuit decision from March 2026 that vacated a default judgment in a Schedule A case because the record showed no completed sales in Illinois .

The judge added that any motion for alternative service must be accompanied by briefing on whether the Hague Convention applies, citing the Seventh Circuit ‘s May 2026 ruling in Kangol LLC v. Hangzhou Chuanyue Silk Import & Export Co.

Panic At The Disco LLC filed a Schedule A case of its own in the same Chicago court in August 2023 , according to court records reviewed by MBW .

That case, before Judge Sara L. Ellis , produced a preliminary injunction in September 2023 and a default judgment the following month.

The new filing is the latest in a run of anti-counterfeiting actions in the music business, several of them brought in the same Chicago court.

Live Nation ‘s merchandise subsidiary Merch Traffic filed its own Schedule A suit there on August 5, over merchandise for artists including Nirvana and Bruno Mars .

The Merch Traffic and Panic At The Disco LLC complaints both allege that the storefronts are designed to “appear to unknowing consumers to be authorized online retailers, outlet stores, or wholesalers.”

Marketplaces have also been sued directly, with Twenty One Pilots taking Temu to court in California in September 2025 over what their complaint called “blatant copies” of their merchandise.

Panic! at the Disco formed in 2004 and announced its disbandment on January 24, 2023 , the complaint states.

The band’s single I Write Sins Not Tragedies reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in August 2006.

The band returned to the stage at the When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas in October 2025, and a 20th anniversary edition of A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out followed on January 23, 2026 through DCD2/ Fueled By Ramen .

The two registrations asserted in the case cover clothing and audio recordings, and were both registered in May 2019 .

The Schedule A defendants have not been publicly identified, and the sealed exhibits are to remain under seal until the defendants are served, at which point they will be unsealed, the order states. Music Business Worldwide

_Originally reported by [Music Business Worldwide](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/panic-at-the-disco-company-sues-online-sellers-over-counterfeit-merch/)._