The United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected Mariah Carey’s request to trademark the title “Queen of Christmas.”
The American star’s application was dismissed because her label did not address the objections of another performer.
She would have been able to prohibit others from using the name on albums and products if she had registered it as a trademark. The efforts to trademark “QOC” and “Princess Christmas” by Carey similarly met with no success.
Since the debut of her song “All I Want for Christmas Is You” in 1994, the singer’s name has become almost inseparable from the holiday season.
The omnipresent holiday song, which has been working its way up the charts for the last 26 years, will eventually top the UK singles chart in 2020.
Last year, Carey’s firm, Lotion LLC, registered for the yuletide trademark, prompting a court challenge from another singer, Elizabeth Chan, in August.
Chan criticised Carey, who was crowned “Queen of Christmas” by The New Yorker in 2018, for releasing new Christmas music every year for a decade.
“I feel very strongly that no one person should hold onto anything around Christmas or monopolise it in the way that Mariah seeks to in perpetuity,” said Chan in an interview with Variety in August. “That’s just not the right thing to do. Christmas is for everyone. It’s meant to be shared; it’s not meant to be owned.”
Carey, according to Chan, has been “trying to trademark this in every imaginable way,” from music, clothing and alcohol, to “masks, dog collars – it’s all over the map.
“If you knit a ‘Queen of Christmas’ sweater, you should be able to sell it on Etsy to anybody else so that they may buy it for their grandma,” she said. It’s crazy- it would have that breadth of registration.”
By failing to react to Chan’s objection on time, Carey’s firm had the trademark denied, allowing knitters all over the globe to continue their work without worrying that they were infringing on Chan’s copyright over the Christmas season.
Darlene Love, another singer, had previously claimed, on Facebook, that she had held the title of “Queen of Christmas” long before Carey’s meteoric rise to stardom.
Famous for her renditions of holiday standards like “Winter Wonderland” and “White Christmas,” as well as her own holiday favourite “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” Love is a true Christmas music legend.
The lawsuit against Carey for copyright infringement about her own Christmas tune was dismissed earlier this month by country artist Andy Stone.
The composer, who goes under the stage name Vince Vance and fronts the band Vince Vance and the Valiants, filed a lawsuit against the superstar in June, alleging that he had co-written a song by the same title five years earlier.
He informed the court that he would be dropping the lawsuit, but he retained his right to re-file it.
Last week, Carey got an early Christmas present from Netflix in the form of an in-home screening of The Crown Season 5 since she is the show’s “ultimate superfan.”
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