Kanye West makes his first presidential campaign appearance Sunday, July 19, 2020, in North Charleston, South Carolina, to run for president as an independent candidate. Lauren Petracca Ipetracca/The Post And Courier via AP File
When it comes to t-shirt sales, “White Lives Matter” won’t give Kanye West a dime. The rapper, whose legal name is Ye, does not own the trademark of the phrase and the black men who do seem inclined to license it.
Phoenix radio hosts Ramses Ja and Quinton Ward were awarded the trademark by a longtime listener of their social justice-focused show, “Civic Cipher,” Capital B Atlanta reported this week, keeping the applicant’s name anonymous. .
“This person who first got it didn’t really love having it, because the purpose wasn’t necessarily to get rich off of it; the purpose was to make sure other people didn’t get rich off that pain,” Ja told the news site.
A trademark application was filed under the name Jae Gibson on October 3, according to the US Patent and Trademark Office database, and Ja and Ward acquired the trademark on October 28, according to Capital B. A Gibson voicemail was full when the Los Angeles Times reached out for comment, and a text message responded “not delivered.”
Ye and conservative maven Candace Owens posed in “White Lives Matter” long-sleeved T-shirts on Oct. 3 at the rapper and designer’s Paris Fashion Week show for his Yeezy line. The models in the show also wore the shirts. The move was not well received. Since then, Ye has seen massive business losses from his continued anti-Semitic and conspiratorial comments. Last week he attacked the mother of George Floyd’s son as “greedy” after she filed a $250 million defamation suit against her over recent comments about how Floyd died.
Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced to more than 20 years for Floyd’s murder, sparking protests around the world.
But while Ye might have made headlines for “White Lives Matter,” the rights to capitalize on the phrase, or not, do not belong to him and almost certainly never will.
According to the trademark database, a form was filed Oct. 7 transferring contact information to a Phoenix address associated with Ja. Another form was filed Wednesday to change the ownership of the registry to Civic Cipher LLC and the mailing address to a UPS store in Phoenix.
The original applicant chose to give the mark to radio hosts, Ja said, because “they felt we were in a much more public position to use it for the benefit of black people.”
Ward and Ja now have the right to sue anyone who uses the phrase for financial gain through the sale of tops, briefs or panties, T-shirts or tank tops, hoodies, jeggings or leggings, tracksuits or sweatshirts, socks , sports jackets, dresses, skirts, shorts and more.
One item mentioned might hurt Ye more than most, given his penchant for covering himself from head to toe: Ski goggles that say “White Lives Matter” would be under trademark protection.
The radio hosts decided to accept ownership of the brand, Ja told CNN, “once it became clear that someone could make a significant profit from it.” The phrase has been deemed white supremacist hate speech by the Anti-Defamation League and a “racist response” to the Black Lives Matter movement by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“[A]As you have seen,” said Ja, “even though he [West] He says some really hurtful, divisive and sometimes crazy things, he has a bit of a fanatical following, and every time he releases something, it sells out.”
A couple of weeks after Ye unveiled his T-shirts, which had images of two different potatoes on the front and the WLM slogan on the back, one of his associates reportedly gave a box away to people living on Skid Row in the Center of Los Angeles.
Ja told Capital B that he and his co-host saw two ways their ownership of the trademark could go: Someone could offer millions to own the brand, in which case they would sell and donate the cash to a nonprofit that support blacks, or they could one day grant the rights to the “White Lives Matter” trademark to Black Lives Matter.
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Source: news.google.com