Greg Ginn & Keith Morris Speak Out About Black Flag Lawsuit

The recently filed lawsuit that sees Greg Ginn and his label SST Records taking on the band FLAG, featuring former members of Ginn's group Black Flag, and former Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins has been one of the more unpleasant punk rock stories of the year so far. Now, for the first time, both Ginn and Keith Morris from FLAG have spoken about the legal action.

Read all about the lawsuit here.

Ginn issued an official statement on the Black Flag website last week, saying that the suit is not intended to stop FLAG from touring, but to stop them “misleading” fans and selling “bootleg items”. The full statement is as follows:

“The dispute over Black Flag is not motivated by an effort to stop anyone from covering Black Flag songs. Quite to the contrary. this dispute began when Henry Garfield (Rollins) and Keith Morris made an effort to hijack the name — and the logo — for their own use. Behind everyone's back, in September 2012, Garfield and Morris filed fraudulent trademark applications in which they are claiming to own the name and the logo. Had we not taken action, this pair could have snuck these false applications through the Trademark Office, enabling them to stop Black Flag from playing and gaining exclusive use of the name and logo for themselves. We are also trying to stop Morris and the others in his band from using the name and the logo in a misleading way, and from selling bootleg items.”

Speaking with MTV Hive, Ginn's lawyer Evan Cohen expands a little of the bootleg merchandise claims, saying that FLAG have started using the iconic Black Flag bars on their merchandise. He says that this led them to a point where Ginn and SST had no choice but to sue.

“They forced us to do this, because not only do we need to bring an opposition to the trademark application in the trademark office, but we also need to bring what's called a cancelation action for cancelation of the existing mark — for the four bars,” Cohen said. “Then we also found out that they're also selling bootleg T-shirts on the tour and then they started — about halfway through the tour — they started using the actual bars, not the even bars, but the uneven bars. It's like they ratcheted up their usage of the Black Flag materials and it came to a point where we couldn't not sue them.”

The often outspoken original Black Flag vocalist – and now FLAG frontman – Keith Morris had his say in an interview with the Phoenix New Times, Morris seems somewhat unperturbed by the suit and assures that the band will continue to tour and play for the foreseeable future.

“We've done nothing wrong. Every step of the way, we've all talked to each other--"we're going to do this," or "we're not going to do that"--we know what he is capable of doing and we're not scared, we're not shaking in our shoes, we're not going to be bullied. We'll just proceed forward. We live our lives, and whatever the outcome is, we're good guys, we've done nothing wrong, so we don't really have to worry about anything.

“We are going to continue forward. We're going to continue forward until somebody that we deal with on a day to day basis tells us we can't do it.”

Here's FLAG playing My War.

Here's Black Flag playing Can't Decide, Rise Above and Jealous Again.

Black Flag tour Australia in November.