Beyoncé is continuing her twelve-year fight to trademark her firstborn’s name.
In 2012, one week after Blue Ivy’s birth, Beyonce’s BGK Trademark Holdings LLC sent an application to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to register her daughter’s unique name as a trademark.
Now twelve years later, the superstars lawyers recently filed a motion to the USPTO to register Blue Ivy Carter’s name as a trademark, according to Billboard.
This follows a ruling from earlier this year denying the trademark to prevent confusion with a single-store clothing boutique in Wisconsin that had used the name since before Blue Ivy was born.
The singer’s lawyers argue that the ruling should be overturned, because no one would confuse Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s daughter with a Midwest clothing shop.
“No reasonable consumer would ever suffer any form of confusion when encountering the [store’s] logo, which is used with one small shop in Fish Creek, Wisconsin, an unincorporated community with a population of approximately 997 people,” Beyoncé’s attorneys said in a statement, per Billboard. “Nor would a reasonable consumer encounter the ‘Blue Ivy Carter’ mark and conclude that the famous Carter family had teamed up with a small shop in rural Wisconsin to launch a clothing line.”
As Black Enterprise reports, the delay for the trademark also stems from a legal dispute with Veronica Morales, who owns a lifestyle event planning company named ‘Blue Ivy’ and holds a trademark for it. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office dismissed Morales’s complaints in 2020.
Beyoncé’s attorneys submitted the same trademark registration but encountered a setback in April when a trademark examiner issued a tentative ruling stating that the mark was ‘confusingly similar’ to the name of a Wisconsin clothing store, which has held a trademark for its ‘Blue Ivy’ logo since 2011.
“People wanted to make products based on our child’s name, and you don’t want anybody trying to benefit off your baby’s name,” Jay-Z told Vanity Fair in 2013. “It wasn’t for us to do anything; as you see, we haven’t done anything.”