On September 17, 2026, Brass Jar, the New York–based company behind the long-running live show "Drunk Shakespeare," filed a trademark suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida against Amazon and its studio arm, Amazon MGM Studios. The case is Brass Jar, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., No. 1:26-cv-26432. Brass Jar claims that Prime Video's YA ice-hockey romance "Off Campus" — one of the streamer's biggest hits of the year — used its registered "Drunk Shakespeare" and "Drunk" trademarks without permission, in an episode built around a fictional college production of the very show Brass Jar has spent years building into a brand. The filing was picked up fast across the entertainment and legal press, from Variety and Bloomberg Law to TheWrap, BroadwayWorld, and IMDb.
What makes this one worth a closer look isn't the star power. It's the seam it exposes between two things independent creators routinely conflate: owning the content you make and owning the name you make it under. Brass Jar isn't suing over a script it wrote or a scene it shot. It's suing over a brand — a name, a look, a reputation built one ticketed performance at a time — that it says a streaming giant borrowed to add color to someone else's story. That is a trademark question, not a copyright one, and the distinction is the whole point.
What the lawsuit says
According to the complaint and the coverage around it, the dispute centers on Episode 4 of "Off Campus," titled "The Breakup." Brass Jar alleges the episode contains "an extended sequence set at a fictional college 'Drunk Shakespeare' production, together with multiple lines of dialogue referencing 'Drunk Shakespeare,'" all without its authorization or consent. The company says it owns federal registrations for both "Drunk Shakespeare" and the broader "Drunk" mark it uses across a family of theatrical shows, and that Amazon's use — inside the episode and in promotional material, reportedly including a behind-the-scenes video titled "BTS Drunk Shakespeare" — is likely to confuse viewers into thinking the theater company endorsed, licensed, or was otherwise connected to the series.
The complaint also lays out a pre-suit exchange that Brass Jar clearly wants the court to notice. Its lawyers say they wrote to Amazon on June 3, 2026 — weeks after all eight episodes premiered — raising the unauthorized trademark use. Amazon's counsel, according to the filing, responded with an extended explanation of why the program did not infringe Brass Jar's copyright — even though Brass Jar says it had never raised copyright at all. Brass Jar pleads trademark infringement and related Lanham Act claims, and asks for attorneys' fees, treble damages, and statutory damages of up to $2 million per counterfeit mark per category of goods or services — the enhanced remedies the Lanham Act reserves for counterfeiting — along with injunctive relief.
Amazon has not yet answered on the merits, and nothing has been decided. These are allegations in a complaint, not findings; Amazon has not conceded that the depiction infringes anything, and being named as a defendant is not evidence of wrongdoing. A trademark fight like this turns on how an ordinary viewer perceives the use and on where the line sits between an expressive reference and a commercial one — which is exactly why it is being litigated rather than resolved with a phone call. What follows is the legal question the filing raises, not a prediction of how it resolves.
The hard part: a reference, or a source identifier?
Trademark law does not give anyone a monopoly on a phrase. It protects a mark as an indicator of source — a signal to consumers about who stands behind a product or service. So the central question in a case like this is not "did they say the words 'Drunk Shakespeare'?" Everyone agrees they did. The question is whether the audience is likely to be confused into believing Brass Jar produced, sponsored, or authorized the series. Naming a fictional college show after a real one, on its own, is the kind of thing storytellers do constantly; brands appear in movies and television all the time without a license, precisely because depicting the world as it is has real artistic value.
That is why expressive works get meaningful breathing room. Courts have long been reluctant to let trademark law police the content of movies, shows, and songs unless the use has no genuine artistic relevance or explicitly misleads viewers about who made the work. An episode that stages a college production called "Drunk Shakespeare" has an obvious storytelling reason to invoke the name. The harder terrain is everything around the episode — the marketing. Promotional material sits closer to commercial speech than the drama itself does, and a behind-the-scenes clip that leans on the "Drunk Shakespeare" name to sell the show is treated differently from a scene that merely depicts one. Add the counterfeiting theory and its $2 million-per-mark exposure, and you have a case whose outcome may hinge less on the episode than on how Amazon promoted it, and on whether any viewer could reasonably have thought the theater company was involved. Where the record shows a clean, expressive reference, the claim narrows. Where it shows the mark doing commercial work outside the story, it widens.
Why it matters beyond one lawsuit
Strip away the streaming numbers and this is a lesson the IP Feed keeps returning to from a different door than usual: your copyrights protect what you make, but your trademarks protect who you are. For independent creators, that second category is the one most often left unguarded. You register the screenplay and clear the music, then build a live show, a festival, a series, or a production banner into a recognizable name — and never file a thing to protect the name itself. Brass Jar is in a position to make a claim against Amazon for one unglamorous reason: it treated "Drunk Shakespeare" as an asset, registered the marks, and could point to specific federal registrations when a much larger company put the words on screen.
The practical takeaways are concrete. If you are building a brand — a show title, a company name, a recurring format, a logo or distinctive look audiences associate with you — a federal trademark registration is what converts reputation into an enforceable right, and it is far cheaper to secure early than to litigate later. Keep evidence of how and where you use the mark, because trademark rights live in actual use in commerce. And know the difference running the other way, too: when your own work references real brands, understand that depiction inside a story stands on much firmer ground than using someone else's name to market your project. The line between homage and endorsement is exactly where these cases are won and lost. For creators who spend years making a name mean something, that line is worth learning before a lawyer draws it for you.
We'll track this docket as it develops. The first real signals will come as Amazon answers — whether it argues the depiction is a protected expressive use, disputes that any consumer confusion is plausible, or challenges the counterfeiting theory and its damages — and as the court begins sorting the trademark and trade-dress claims. Follow the filings, counsel, and coverage on the case page.
This post is editorial commentary on public court filings and news coverage, not legal advice. The allegations described are unproven, the defendants have not yet responded on the merits, and being named as a defendant is not evidence of wrongdoing. Details are drawn from the docket and press reports and may be refined as the case develops.