Opinion of the Court
had produced and distributed a film by Federico Fellini titled “Ginger and Fred” about two fictional Italian cabaret dancers (Pippo and Amelia) who imitated Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. When the film was released in the United States, Ginger Rogers objected under the Lanham Act to the use of her name. The Second Circuit rejected the claim. It reasoned that the titles of “artistic works,” like the works themselves, have an “expressive element” implicating “First Amendment values.” 875 F. 2d, at 998. And at the same time, such names posed only a “slight risk” of confusing consumers about either “the source or the content of the work.” Id., at 999–1000. So, the court concluded, a threshold filter was appropriate. When a title “with at least some artistic relevance” was not “explicitly misleading as to source or content,” the claim could not go forward. Ibid. But the court made clear that it was not announcing a general rule. In the typical case, the court thought, the name of a product was more likely to indicate its source, and to be taken by consumers in just that way. See id., at 1000.
Over the decades, the lower courts adopting Rogers have confined it to similar cases, in which a trademark is used not to designate a work’s source, but solely to perform some other expressive function. So, for example, when the toymaker Mattel sued a band over the song “Barbie Girl”—with lyrics including “Life in plastic, it’s fantastic” and “I’m a blond bimbo girl, in a fantasy world”—the Ninth Circuit applied Rogers. Mattel, Inc. v. MCA Records, Inc., 296 F. 3d 894, 901 (2002). That was because, the court reasoned, the band’s use of the Barbie name was “not [as] a source identifier”: The use did not “speak[] to [the song’s] origin.” Id., at 900, 902; see id., at 902 (a consumer would no more think that the song was “produced by Mattel” than would, “upon hearing Janis Joplin croon ‘Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?,’ … suspect that she and the carmaker had entered into a joint venture”). Similarly, the Eleventh Circuit dismissed a suit under Rogers when a sports artist
