What’s in a name?

What would you call a band featuring former Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee, former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Gilby Clarke and former Metallica bassist Jason Newsted?

Anything but “Supernova.”

For now, that name belongs to a punk band from the planet “Cynot3” that came to Costa Mesa in 1989 and started playing their “Spacewave” music in a garage at Broadway and Santa Ana Avenue.

A federal judge in San Diego County last week issued a temporary injunction against Mark Burnett Productions, creator of the CBS reality show “Rock Star: Supernova,” barring the show and the Lee-Clarke-Newsted band from using the Supernova name.

The Costa Mesa band and its attorney John Mizhir argued that the TV show and the “super group” — as they were called during the “Rock Star” finale Wednesday — infringed on the Costa Mesa punk band’s common law trademark.

“They had a long history of using the mark,” Mizhir said, calling the judge’s decision “sweet justice.”

“We feel vindicated,” he said.

Band members Jodey Lawrence, Art Mitchell and David Collins were unavailable for comment Friday.

Supernova band manager Greg Jacobs, a Newport Beach native, said the band started humbly.

“They started writing songs in that garage and playing locally when there were places in Costa Mesa to play,” Jacobs said. “They started playing around and people really started to like them pretty quickly. Their songs were catchy and fun.”

The guys dress in spacesuits and play songs about Oreos and Chewbacca, Han Solo’s wookie friend from George Lucas’ “Star Wars” films. It was the latter song that received the most notice when it was featured in the movie “Clerks,” filmmaker Kevin Smith’s cult classic of the 1990s. The band has released three albums, multiple seven-inch singles and has a history of touring, which led the judge to believe the CBS show had infringed on their name.

Jacobs said the band’s last album was released in 2002 and they played at the Detroit Bar on West 19th Street in May to a sold-out crowd.

“It [Newport-Mesa] is where the majority of their support is,” he said. “It was seriously like a high school reunion.”

Greg Hecker, an attorney with The Hecker Law Group representing Mark Burnett Productions, disagrees with the court’s decision.

“I think it’s important to note that the punk band specifically did not ask the court to keep the ‘Rock Star: Supernova’ band from using the word supernova in its name,” he said. The case was scheduled for a hearing Friday, but no information was available and the attorneys were unavailable for comment.