Katy Perry chose her stage name because she worried that her actual name, Katy Hudson, might be too close to a certain rom-com-associated actress. Nobody’s confusing Katy Perry for Kate Hudson, but that stage name did wind up getting Perry into a 16-year legal dispute with an Australian designer whose brand just so happens to be called Katie Perry.
Per the Guardian, fashion designer Katie Taylor applied to register her birth name, Katie Perry, as a business name in April 2007 and subsequently as a trademark for the sale of clothes in September 2008. Between those two dates, Perry released her debut single “I Kissed A Girl,” but Taylor says she wasn’t aware of the singer yet. The following year, Perry began selling merch worldwide via her webstore — including to Australia — and in May 2009, Perry filed a notice of opposition to the registration of Taylor’s trademark as well as sent her cease and desist letters.
However, according to Australian court documents, Perry’s team says they never sued Taylor for copyright infringement. Perry’s manager, Steven Jensen, encouraged her to make a public statement about the issue in light of negative tabloid backlash, but Perry refused: “Stupid bitches. I wouldn’t have even bothered with this [if] mtv hadn’t picked up this silliness,” Perry wrote back in an email. “Dumb bitch! Rawr!”
Taylor’s “Katie Perry” copyright was formally registered in July 2009 in Australia, and Perry’s trademark was registered in Australia in November 2011. But Perry’s trademark didn’t include the sale of clothes, leading Taylor to sue Perry in federal court sometime around 2018; Taylor alleged her trademark had been infringed upon by the sale of Perry’s “Kitty Purry” merch in Australia, and Perry subsequently applied for the designer’s trademark to be cancelled, arguing that Taylor’s label was “likely to deceive or cause confusion” considering the singer’s recognizability.
Taylor initially won the case in 2023, but lost on appeal the following year when judges unanimously overturned the original findings in Perry’s favor. Taylor then took the case to Australia’s highest court. Those judges ruled that, because most of the merch Perry sold in Australia was clothes despite the “Katy Perry” trademark not extending to clothes, that the singer had “very much deliberate[ly]” infringed on Taylor’s copyright.