from the but…but…but… dept
The fact that this is still going is absolutely insane. If you haven’t followed along with us in the saga of Katy Perry, the famous pop star, and Katie Perry, a local Australian clothing designer, and the trademark dispute between the two, I will happily catch you up in truncated form. Please note that I will stick mostly to first names to avoid confusion as much as is possible. Here we go.
Katie Taylor in Australia has a clothing line sold under the label “Katie Perry.” She sued Katy Perry because the singer sold clothing merch during a 2014 tour in Australia, nearly 9 years later. She claimed at the time that this was trademark infringement, indicating that she was concerned that the public would be confused into thinking the concert merch was produced by Katie’s company (keep this in mind, it will be very important later). Amazingly, the courts agreed and ruled that Katy’s company, Kitty Purry, was liable for infringement. Katy appealed the decision, which Katie indicated was a personal attack against her, despite her having initiated the trademark lawsuit to begin with. The courts ended up finding for Katy on appeal, reversing the lower court’s ruling that infringement had occurred and canceling Katie’s trademarks as a result. Part of the reasoning for that included evidence that Katie had actually attempted to associate her clothing line with Katy, rather than the other way around, and that Katy had used the nom de plume for several years before Katie’s clothing line had even been formed.
You would think that might have been enough, but Katie appealed the ruling up to the High Court, arguing both that it was trademark infringement for Katy Perry to sell Katy Perry merch and that the rescinded trademarks should be restored. Well, the latest reporting on how that appeal is going seems to be centered around just how famous Katy was in 2008.
How famous was Katy Perry in 2008?
That’s one of the questions Australia’s highest court is considering, after hearing arguments in a long-running trademark dispute between the pop star and a fashion designer with almost the same name. Ms Taylor registered a trade mark in 2007, and says she didn’t know of Perry’s existence at the time.
But it was a different story when she re-registered a year later, with documents lodged in the High Court showing she’d heard I Kissed a Girl on the radio and bought it on iTunes. More than a decade on, Ms Taylor took the singer to court, accusing her of infringing the “Katie Perry” trademark by selling branded shoes, clothing and headwear while on tour in Australia.
I Kissed A Girl was released in April of 2008, for what it’s worth, and was the song that launched Katy Perry into worldwide stardom. Besides that, this nitpicking over the level of fame at a single point in time largely ignores the analysis of the lower court and its stance that the limited nature of the type of clothing Katy Perry was releasing was such that public confusion wasn’t going to be a thing. These were concert items, not to be confused with a more typical fashion line.
Which, on the question of Katie’s trademarks, is something her own lawyers appear to agree with.
The designer sat in the front row of the courtroom’s public gallery wearing a black jacket and pants, accompanied by her mother and stepfather.
Her lawyers argued shoppers were savvy enough to distinguish between the two spellings, and would not think Ms Taylor’s clothes were linked to the pop star.
Except that if that’s true, then what in the hell are we doing here? If we trust the public to not make an association between the two, then this isn’t causing public confusion, and there is no need to have brought the trademark action against Katy Perry at all.
The larger point is that this is way, way too much time, energy, and effort for a trademark dispute that needn’t have occurred at all. Of all the folks invested in this dispute, it appears the Australian public has no stake in any of it.
Filed Under: australia, katie perry, katy perry, trademark
Companies: kitty purry
