Trademark law
Trademark profits stay with Trojan Battery after appeal
Trojan Battery will keep $1.3 million from Trojan EV and $3.4 million from GCC, even after the Fifth Circuit threw out the trademark injunction. The judges said the profits award still fits, despite concerns with the trial court’s finding that customers were actually confused.
Trojan Battery held onto the money award in federal court, even as the Fifth Circuit wiped out the injunction. The judges said the remaining confusion factors still supported infringement and left disgorgement in place.
- Liability and profits award affirmed
- Permanent injunction vacated
- Court said actual confusion finding was clearly wrong
- Remaining confusion factors still supported infringement
- Defendants had to prove deductions and non-infringing profits
The federal Fifth Circuit split the remedies in Trojan Battery’s trademark fight. Trojan Battery kept the liability judgment and the profits award against Golf Carts of Cypress, Trojan EV and GCC, but the court wiped out the permanent injunction and sent that issue back for more proceedings.
That leaves the practical result in an unusual place. The company still has a court ruling saying the defendants infringed, and it still has the money award, but the order that would have barred future conduct does not survive in its current form.
Why the infringement finding survived
The panel said the district court clearly erred when it found actual confusion, the kind of evidence showing buyers were genuinely misled. But that mistake did not undo the rest of the confusion analysis. The remaining factors still supported a likelihood of confusion, so the liability finding stayed in place.
That matters because trademark cases do not rise or fall on one piece of evidence alone. Here, the judges treated actual confusion as important but not dispositive, which let the infringement ruling stand even after they corrected the trial court on that point.
Why the profits award stayed attached
The money award also survived. The court kept the Lanham Act profits remedy in place, saying disgorgement can strip away gains from infringement, prevent unjust enrichment and deter willful infringement. In other words, a defendant can lose the money even when another part of the remedy package gets narrowed.
The panel also left the burden-shifting framework intact, which put the pressure on the defendants to prove deductions and profits not tied to the infringement. The award had been recalculated to $1,301,507 from Trojan EV and $3,400,215 from GCC.
For businesses in trademark fights, that split is the lesson. A win on liability can still leave one remedy open to attack while another stays locked in, and the bottom line can survive even when the injunction does not.