Mickey Mouse vs. Justin Sun: crypto community reacts to recent Tron trademark rejections 🚨 This article is 5 years old...
Mickey Mouse vs. Justin Sun: crypto community reacts to recent Tron trademark rejections
2 min read
Updated: Dec. 22, 2019 at 5:59 am UTC
Photo by Jayme McColgan on Unsplash
The crypto community has been gripped by recent news that popular cryptocurrency company Tron had applications for three trademarks blocked by entertainment giant Disney, predicated on the claim that the trademarks would “damage” their brand.
The denial of these trademarks is certainly a blow to the blockchain company, and the crypto community has weighed in with a myriad of different responses for what this could mean going forward.
Disney slaps down Tron, leading to multiple trademark rejections
As originally reported by Decrypt, Tron had three trademarks relating to its company name rejected by the USPTO on the grounds that they would damage Disney’s brand due to the blockchain company sharing a name with the famed Disney movie – Tron.
In the time following the story from Decrypt, Justin Sun – the CEO and founder of Tron, explained in a tweet thread that the latest rejections only apply to a certain class of trademark applications, and that they don’t impact its core trademarks that directly relate to their branding. In the Twitter thread, Sun said:
“TRON’s brand is well-established and reputed worldwide. Lots of misinformed FUD falsely claiming about TRON trademark invalidated by Disney.
When a trademark application is filed in the United States, it has to specify a “class” for the type of product or service that the trademark belongs to.”
He followed up by saying:
“TRON has filed trademark applications in the United States for various marks in different classes, many of which have not been challenged and are not affected by Disney.
Those challenged by Disney belong to supplemental classes and were filed for defensive purposes. They do not affect Tron’s core trademarks.
Tron will continue to actively prosecute its trademarks in the United States. Tron has also already received trademark registrations in many other countries around the world.
In short, this is just a trademark office proceeding on registration and not a determination on Tron’s use of its name. Tron will and can continue to use its well-established name and brand.”
Tim Copeland, Decrypt’s editor, later followed up with a tweet containing a comment from attorney Jake Chervinsky about the imbroglio:
“Jake Chervinsky, counsel at Compound, said, ‘Tron clearly didn’t take the trademark registration process seriously. They never hired U.S. counsel to represent them, even though the USPTO explicitly ordered them to do so.’”
Is a rebrand imminent?
Although Justin Sun is adamant that the latest series of trademark rejections don’t have any impact on the company’s core branding, his denials didn’t stop so-called “Crypto Twitter” from sharing facetious ideas about how Tron could best rebrand themselves.
One user with the handle @drhex2c said that he will be patiently awaiting the imminent “Tronix” rebrand pump. He said:
“Get ready for the #Tronix rebrand scam pump, you know it’s coming.”
Tron is a bit notorious for engaging in marketing stunts in an attempt to sway their token’s price, which means that a hyped rebrand is certainly not a possibility that should be discounted.
In the midst of all this controversy, Tron’s token has seen overwhelmingly bearish price action, plummeting from one-month highs of over $0.016 to lows of $0.0125 before climbing to its current price of 0.013.
It remains unclear as to whether or not this controversy will have any long-term impacts on Tron’s price, but at the very least, the resulting community commentary via Twitter provides for some decent entertainment.
TRON Market Data
At the time of press 5:59 am UTC on Dec. 22, 2019, TRON is ranked #11 by market cap and the price is up 6.36% over the past 24 hours. TRON has a market capitalization of $949.67 million with a 24-hour trading volume of $1.2 billion. Learn more about TRON ›
Crypto Market Summary
At the time of press 5:59 am UTC on Dec. 22, 2019, the total crypto market is valued at at $190.54 billion with a 24-hour volume of $63.08 billion. Bitcoin dominance is currently at 68.33%. Learn more about the crypto market ›
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TRON is one of the largest blockchain-based operating systems.
Justin Sun has carved a name for himself as a leading figure in the blockchain sector.