Lady Gaga Sues to Control Her Name

Lady Gaga at the iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas.

Kevin Mazur/WireImage

Lady Gaga has filed a lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court against Excite Worldwide, a Chicago company that has been marketing a line of jewelry and cosmetics called Lady Gaga by Design. Despite the name, the singer has nothing to do with the products, and she wants to eliminate confusion in the market as she develops her own officially endorsed products, including candles, bags, lanyards, tattoos and wigs.

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Gaga's lawyers have also accused Excite Worldwide of filing frivolous trademark applications, which have slowed down her own attempts to trademark her name, likeness and assorted iconography.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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