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Who Owns 'First Alert Weather'? KMOV's Owner Sues KSDK Over Use

Gray Media Group says they trademarked the phrase in 2007

By Ryan Krull on Mon, Sep 18, 2023 at 2:24 pm

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Screengrab from Gray Media Group's lawsuit.

KSDK's use of 'Weather First' branding.

A storm is brewing in local weather coverage in St. Louis.

Today in federal court, the parent company of KMOV (Channel 4) filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming that KSDK (Channel 5) stole the phrase "First Alert Weather" from them.

Gray Media Group says that stations they own began using the now-contended three-word phrase in 2005. They registered it as a trademark in 2007 and began rolling it out in the St. Louis market in September 2022.

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Screengrab from Gray Media Group's lawsuit.

KMOV's "First Alert Weather" graphic.

Gray accuses KSDK and its parent company Tegna of committing trademark infringement when in late 2022 they started putting a similar phrase on their own weather graphics.

The lawsuit, which is full of screenshots of local news, claims that in October, two months after KMOV started using "First Alert Weather," KSDK began began branding its meteorological coverage as "Weather First," and that those two words were often in close proximity to the word "Alert."

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Screengrab from Gray Media Group's lawsuit.

KSDK's use of "Weather First" branding, with an "Alert" too close for KMOV's comfort.

The suit says that attorneys for Gray reached out to KSDK asking them to stop or to negotiate some sort of "co-existence agreement."

Those efforts clearly backfired because, since then, KSDK has moved the word "Alert"— and placed it right between "First" and "Weather." And if KMOV didn't like their three words being together on the KSDK screen, they really didn't like KSDK adopting the phrase "First Alert Weather" verbatim as their own.

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Screengrab from Gray Media Group's lawsuit.

KSDK's use of the phrase, "First Alert Weather," which they are now getting sued over.

The attorneys for Gray/KMOV accuse KSDK of changing the branding of their weather coverage "at least in part so that they could profit from the goodwill built by Gray over many years." They are asking the court to tell KSDK to stop using the phrase, as well as award monetary damages from the alleged infringement.

Which news outlet, if any, owns the phrase "First Alert Weather" is now a matter for the judge.

We just hope Fox 2 manages to stay out of the fracas — and that no one else has trademarked the phrase, "After all, you paid for it."