A decade later, Beyoncé is still pushing for a trademark in her daughter Blue Ivy's name

Beyoncé's lawyers are again asking federal regulators to trademark Blue Ivy Carter's name, more than 12 years after she and Jay-Z first tried to lock down the copyright in their daughter's name .

In a motion filed last week with the federal trademark office, lawyers for Beyoncé's company rejected a ruling earlier this year that consumers could confuse the name with another Blue Ivy: a one-store clothing boutique in Wisconsin that used the name from before young Carter was born.

The star's lawyers say the decision should be overturned, arguing that no one is going to mistake Beyoncé and Jay-Z's daughter – once called the “most famous baby in the world” – for a small clothing store.

“No reasonable consumer would ever suffer any form of confusion when encountering it [store’s] logo, which is used with a small store in Fish Creek, Wisconsin, an unincorporated community with a population of approximately 997,” Beyoncé's lawyers write. “No reasonable consumer would come across the 'Blue Ivy Carter' mark and conclude that the famous Carter family had partnered with a small shop in rural Wisconsin to launch a clothing line.”

A lawyer for Beyoncé's company did not immediately return a request for comment on the status of the trademark case.

A few weeks after Blue Ivy's birth in January 2012, Beyoncé's BGK Trademark Holdings LLC applied to the US Patent and Trademark Office to trademark her unusual name. The move raised eyebrows at the time, as fans wondered if the couple were commercializing their daughter. But Jay-Z later said Vanity fair that they simply wanted to prevent others from exploiting her name.

“People wanted to make products based on our kid's name, and you don't want anyone trying to cash in on your baby's name,” she told the magazine in 2013. “It wasn't for us to do anything. as you see, we have done nothing.”

More than 12 years later, however, Blue Ivy's parents have yet to secure the trademark registration.

For years, the process was mired in legal wrangling with a woman named Veronica Morales, who runs a lifestyle event design company called “Blue Ivy” and secured her own trademark on it. In 2020, a court at the USPTO dismissed Morales' complaints, ruling that the two sides' respective offers were “so dissimilar that confusion is unlikely.”

This decision seemingly paved the way for the 'Blue Ivy Carter' trademark registration to eventually be granted. But BGK's lawyers never pursued that application, and the USPTO ultimately ruled the application abandoned last year.

In November 2023, Beyoncé's lawyers filed again to register the same trademark. Like previous efforts, however, the new application quickly hit a roadblock: In April, a trademark examiner issued a temporary ruling that the mark was “confusingly similar” to the name of the Wisconsin clothing store, which owned a trademark in “Blue Ivy logo” since 2011.

(The Wisconsin boutique itself is not involved in the case and has not filed an opposition to the Blue Ivy Carter trademark. Instead, the USPTO simply cited the earlier trademark as a reason to deny Beyoncé's application.)

It was that cursory denial that Beyoncé's lawyers challenged last week, arguing that Americans know who Blue Ivy Carter is and would never believe she was “somehow connected to a great boutique store in a small town in rural Wisconsin.” .

“From the moment she was born, she resides in the consciousness of the American public and thus … the consumer public will associate her with a trademark bearing her name,” BGK's lawyers write. “Parties exist and thrive in their own separate worlds and may continue to do so in the future.”