By
Kseniia Klichova
April 19th, 2024
Justin Sun of Tron has filed documents to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to register three trademarks. However, Disney issued an objection.
Disney claims that Tron Foundation leader Justin Sun makes use of their TRON trademark. The movie studio has restricted him from achieving the trademarks on certain brand names.
Judge rejected three applications including the one concerning the “TRON” trademark on November 6, 2019. Disney’s representation of the situation is that Chinese billionaire Sun is using dirty tricks to promote his coin. Specifically, he paid the designers to make the TRON cryptocurrency logo to look similar to the one used in the film franchise.
The application says that Sun’s designers used “TRON Marks in all capital letters in a font/stylization that is highly similar in appearance to the unique and distinctive font/stylization of [Disney’s] TRON Marks”.
So, TRON, the currency was using sophisticated font and appearance, like in the movie saga. This sheds light on the roots of Disney’s recent ultimate actions. The fact that TRON cryptocurrency is using the word and appearance that is similar to the one used by a 35 years old trademark provokes sharp questions.
Indeed, if you compare the fonts you’ll see some similarity in terms of the obvious futurism. Disney claims that TRON used Disney’s brand “in the faith of the goodwill and its famous brands”. Disney didn’t go too far to find the proves, as TRON’s official logo is on its website.
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On August 6, 2019 Disney claimed that the word Tron was used across the cryptocurrency promotion on purpose. People who seek to find the arcade and video games dedicated to the Tron movies were finding information about Justin Sun’s blockchain.
Justin’s partner-company in China, Raybo Technology had to answer the allegations in a given time period. But there were no letters in response to Disney claims, which means that Sun’s company will leave their ambition. The Raybo Foundation has filed a patent claims in February 2018. Since then, Disney was quiet but started waves after seeing the Trademark Official Gazette from April 2019. Sun wanted to register such words as “TRON”, “TRONNETWORK”, and “TRONIX”.
Those three names are different variations of the project’s possible names. Justin already used to move his products under such a brand for over 2 years. He didn’t bother about the trademarks or the Disney’s possible lawsuits.
Disney believes that “it [its trademark] is being damaged, and will be damaged, by the registrations”.
This means that TRON crypto project will have to forget about using the mentioned brand names, and the name Tron is under big question now. What if Disney will demand the renaming of the cryptocurrency? What will happen to its public image? If Justin Sun won’t find the way out the situation, it may mean a dead-end for the brand and the new name will become a necessity soon.