Walmart Files Complaint Over Kanye West’s New Yeezy Logo
Walmart Files Complaint Over Kanye West’s New Yeezy Logo! Walmart has reportedly filed a notice of opposition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on grounds that a 2020 trademark application filed by Kanye West’s YEEZY company contains a logo that looks so similar to that of the multinational retail corporation such that it is likely to cause confusion.
As per the original trademark application, Kanye intended to use the logo for his clothing and retail store services, hotel services, musical sound recordings and streaming, and the construction of “non-metal modular homes,” among others. The design in question features “8 dotted lines, each comprising 3 totally shaded circles, with a total of 24 circles, arranged at equal angles as rays from a sun.”
It so happens that it shares some pretty obvious similarities to Walmart’s logo, which comprises 6 yellow rays symmetrically positioned in a circle to resemble a spark. Walmart argues that YEEZY’s use and registration of their sun design logo “is likely to cause confusion, mistake, and deception as to the origin of Yeezy’s goods and services and potentially create a false affiliation with Walmart which will injure and damage Walmart and the goodwill contained within their Mark.”
West is yet to respond or comment on the matter. Walmart is basically pointing to an April 19 letter that was sent to Yeezy’s lawyers indicating that efforts to settle the matter have bone no fruit.
“As we referenced in our correspondence in July and August of 2020, January and February of 2021 and our telephone conference in March of 2021, Walmart has repeatedly sought to understand Yeezy’s planned use of the Yeezy Application, with the goal of finding ways in which the Walmart Spark Design and the Yeezy Application can co-exist with one another,” the letter said. “However, to date, we have not received any conclusive information from Yeezy regarding the planned use or any cooperation from Yeezy in order to find common ground.”
