Katy Perry v Katie Perry trademark dispute: Partner reveals all

In 2024, the full Federal Court upheld the cancellation ground, siding with the singer and finding that the singer’s fame could reasonably cause confusion in the clothing field and that Taylor had registered despite knowledge of that reputation.

However, recently, in March 2026, musician Katy Perry lost her High Court litigation with Australian clothes designer label Katie Perry.

The American singer-songwriter tried to argue that Taylor’s label would confuse customers shopping for her line of Katy Perry-branded “hoodies, T-shirts, tank tops and booty shorts”. But the Australian High Court found the pop star’s team had been unable to prove any real consumer had mixed up the two brands in more than a decade.

The High Court also described the “Katie Perry” trademark as one that would be “seen rather than heard”, something that decreased the “materiality of the aural identity” with singer Katy Perry’s label.

Implications for musicians and brands

The decision could make it harder for celebrities and well-known businesses to use their fame to beat a pre-existing brand’s claim to a trademark. A small business that registers their trademark first, is making consistent use of it and defends it diligently – this decision supports their ability to hold their registration even against a global superstar.

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This is not a clean victory.

The 3:2 split is the real news. Five High Court judges looked at the same facts and the same statute and reached two completely different answers. Even the majority judges had their own reasons and routes to get to the outcome. When that happens, it tells you something important: the law in this area is genuinely complicated, and everyone, including the legislators, needs to sit up and pay attention.

Jagot J’s core holding is that a trademark can only acquire a reputation in respect of particular goods or services and that industry practice cannot substitute for actual use. This is a significant correction. Katy Perry was undeniably famous. But famous in music is not famous in clothing as at the filing date of the Australian designer’s application.

The “common practice” argument got too far in the full court. The full court below used evidence that pop stars commonly sell merchandise to extend the scope of Katy Perry’s reputation into clothing she had never actually sold in Australia. The majority at the HCA correctly identified that as a step too far. You cannot borrow a reputation you have not yet built.

Steward J hands SMEs a shield – the assiduous infringer doctrine, i.e. that a party who knowingly and persistently infringes a registered mark cannot then use the confusion it created to cancel that registration, has the potential of being enormously important for small-business owners.

What the majority reasons collectively stand for is that a valid registration is a real statutory monopoly, not a placeholder that evaporates the moment a more famous brand arrives on the scene. For SMEs, that is an important commercial takeaway from this decision.

Ten years of coexistence with zero confusion evidence mattered significantly. Jagot J’s refusal to dismiss that evidence despite the Katy Perry parties’ argument that Taylor’s business was too small for confusion to have surfaced, reflects a basic principle of proof. The burden was on the party seeking rectification. There was no evidence of actual confusion. That is not nothing.

The singer’s argument that the primary judge erred in refusing to find laches, acquiescence and delay on the designer’s part, which they said should have disentitled her from injunctive relief and limited any account of profits. The full court never decided it because cancellation of the mark rendered all relief moot. Now that the HCA has restored the singer’s mark and allowed her appeal, ground five is live again.

The next steps to the decisions

The full court on remitter will now have to decide whether the primary judge was right to reject the laches/acquiescence defence to relief. The primary judge’s reasoning was that the Katy Perry parties had failed to establish when Taylor first had knowledge of the infringing conduct, so the length of delay could not be measured.

The singer’s ground five argument was simply that the evidence did establish 2009 knowledge. The full court characterised this as re-agitating the evidence before the primary judge with a view to securing a different outcome on appeal, which can signal that the full court was unimpressed with this ground even before it became moot.

Steward J notes the primary judge’s finding that Taylor was not in a financial position to engage lawyers and initiate legal proceedings. Steward J accepted this as a good reason for the delay. That finding, in my opinion, directly undermines the laches argument. Delay that is financially compelled rather than strategic can be much harder to characterise as disentitling conduct.

Given that the primary judge heard all the evidence and made a specific finding about the failure to establish that fact, and given the full court’s own dismissive characterisation of this ground as mere re-agitation, this ground, I think, faces a difficult path. The financial incapacity finding could further insulate the designer from a laches finding.

Aparna Watal is a partner at Halfords IP.