Over the last month, Travis Scott has been on an unstoppable streak. The Houston rapper kicked off the last week of August with a new song, “The Plan,” which appeared in Christopher Nolan’s film Tenet. Soon after, the rapper and McDonald’s announced a new collaboration that debuted a new commercial, a Travis Scott Meal, and a trio of merchandise collections. Despite all this, Travis has a problem on his hands: He has reportedly been sued by video game company KontrolFreek for copyright violations.
According to Page Six, the company claims Travis and Cactus Jack “reproduced KontrolFreek’s copyright-protected” images of its products for their own use. KontrolFreek claims that, as a result of this, false rumors of a possible collaboration between them and Travis began to swirl following his Fortnite performance in April. The video game company says that while Travis and Cactus had not manufactured the copyrighted material at the time, they were contacted by them in May about their willingness to “to manufacture the Cactus Jack Thumbsticks for Defendants, and at no cost.” After this request the two parties did not speak again, but the previous rumors came back to haunt the video game company when Travis and his team released the Cactus Jack-branded controllers.
Consumers were dissatisfied with the “the poor quality” of the controllers, with one consumer saying the controllers “were not like ‘normal kontrol freeks’ [sic].” KontrolFreek later discovered a copyright violation in the packaging of the Cactus Jack controllers including the use of their slogan and “identical bullet points.” KontrolFreek is suing Travis and Cactus Jack for their profits, plus damages, as well as requesting that they halt all sales of the controllers and destroy the rest of the stock.
(via Page Six