Memecoin trademark and IP: using a character, brand or face
The Editor·11 min read·Updated 31 Aug 2026
Memecoin copyright, trademark and right of publicity explained: three different rights, three different tests, and what a launcher and a buyer each risk.
Putting someone else's character, logo or face on a token does not become lawful because the image is everywhere. Three separate rights can be infringed at once — copyright in the artwork, trademark in the name or logo, and right of publicity in a person's likeness — and each has a different owner, a different test and a different remedy.
Reviewed as of 31 August 2026. Jurisdiction: primarily United States, with the caveat that right of publicity is state law and varies materially.
Launchpad culture treats all three of these rights as though they do not exist. They do, they are being asserted, and the assertions are landing in a place most token launchers have not thought about: not on the anonymous deployer, who is usually unreachable, but on the platform, the front-end, and occasionally the holders.
The three rights are not interchangeable
Most coverage of this topic collapses everything into "copyright," which leads people to the wrong defence. Work out which right you are facing first.
| Right | Protects | Who owns it | Core test | Typical remedy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Copyright | The specific artwork, drawing, photograph or video | The artist or their assignee, from the moment of creation | Substantial similarity to a protected work, plus copying | Injunction, actual damages or statutory damages; DMCA takedown |
| Trademark | A name, logo or ticker used as a source identifier | Whoever uses it in commerce for those goods or services | Likelihood of consumer confusion as to source or affiliation | Injunction, profits, damages; domain and platform takedowns |
| Right of publicity | A person's name, likeness, voice, persona | The individual (and in some states their estate) | Commercial use of identity without consent | Injunction, damages; statutory damages in some states |
Copyright arises automatically. Registration is not required for the right to exist, but in the US it is generally required before you can file suit over a US work, and registration timing affects whether statutory damages are available at all. Trademark rights come from use in commerce, not from filing, though registration with the USPTO trademark system strengthens them considerably. Right of publicity is creature of state law — California Civil Code §3344 and California common law, New York Civil Rights Law §§50–51, and roughly half the states besides, with no federal statute and genuinely inconsistent rules on post-mortem rights.
The practical consequence: a token can clear one of these and fail another. Using a public-domain painting sidesteps copyright but not trademark if the name you attach is somebody's brand. Drawing your own version of a character avoids copying the specific artwork but not the character copyright, and not the trademark in the name.
Copyright: meme ubiquity does not extinguish anything
The single most common belief in this category is that once an image has been reposted a hundred million times it has passed into the public domain. It has not. Public domain status comes from expiry of term, from a work never being eligible, or from the owner dedicating it. It does not come from popularity, and it does not come from other people infringing first.
Matt Furie's litigation over Pepe the Frog is the settled demonstration of this. Pepe is about as widely reproduced as any image in internet history, and Furie has nonetheless been able to assert and enforce copyright in the character. The rulings and settlements in that line of cases did not turn on how famous the frog is; they turned on who drew it. Ubiquity is not a defence, and no court has held otherwise.
The Chill Guy episode brought the same point into memecoins directly. Artist Phillip Banks asserted copyright over the character after a token using it reached roughly $300m. The claim did not need a contract with the deployer, or the deployer's identity, or any theory about tokens at all — the artwork was his, and it was being used commercially.
Fair use exists, under 17 U.S.C. §107, and it is a defence rather than a right: you assert it after you have been sued, and it is decided on four factors weighed together. Commercial use of the whole character as the identity of a product being sold is a bad fair-use posture. Transformative parody of the work itself is a much better one. "It is a meme so it is a parody" is not an argument any court has accepted; parody has to target the original, not simply borrow it.
Trademark: the test is confusion, and tickers are the exposure
Trademark is about whether buyers are misled about source or affiliation. Using a brand's name or logo on a token that trades commercially, in a way that suggests the brand launched or endorsed it, is a straightforward likelihood-of-confusion case. The unregistered-mark route under §43(a) of the Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. §1125(a)) means the brand does not need a registration to sue.
Two things narrow the defences that memecoin launchers usually assume they have.
Parody got weaker. In Jack Daniel's Properties, Inc. v. VIP Products LLC, decided by the US Supreme Court in June 2023, the Court held that the Rogers v. Grimaldi First Amendment screen does not apply where the accused party uses the mark as a source identifier for its own goods. A token whose name and logo is the borrowed brand is using it as a source identifier by definition. The expressive-work shelter that a lot of NFT and memecoin projects relied on between 2021 and 2023 is substantially smaller than it was.
Ticker collisions are their own problem. Even leaving the brand owner aside, duplicate tickers are the mechanism by which buyers get defrauded, and a launch that deliberately reuses an established ticker is evidence of intent in a way that is hard to argue away. How to check you have the right contract when tickers collide covers the buyer-side of that; from the launch side, it converts a trademark problem into a fraud problem.
Nominative fair use — referring to a brand to talk about it — remains available and is genuinely useful. It is also narrow: use no more of the mark than necessary, do not use the logo or trade dress, and do not suggest sponsorship.
Right of publicity: the one people forget
If a token uses a real person's name, face, voice or recognisable persona commercially, the person can sue in most US states without any securities or copyright theory at all. This is the exposure that survives every argument about whether a memecoin is a security, because it has nothing to do with financial regulation.
It also compounds. A celebrity-branded token launched without the celebrity's involvement can face a right-of-publicity claim from the person and a fraud claim from buyers who thought the person was behind it — two plaintiffs, opposite sides, same facts. The reverse case, where the celebrity was involved, moves into the territory covered in whether a celebrity can be sued over a memecoin.
Post-mortem rights vary sharply by state, and AI-generated likenesses have added a live and unsettled layer. Do not assume a dead person's likeness is free, and do not assume a synthetic image of a real person is a different question from a photograph of them.
Who actually gets sued: the Burwick cease and desist
The detail that shows how this plays out in practice: Burwick Law, the plaintiffs' firm active in memecoin litigation, sent pump.fun a cease and desist over 200-plus tokens deploying the firm's own intellectual property. The target was the platform, not two hundred anonymous deployers.
That is the structural point. Permissionless deployment means the infringer is usually a wallet address. Rights holders therefore go where there are identifiable entities, servers, revenue and lawyers: the launchpad, the front-end, the DEX interface, the aggregator, the domain registrar, the app store. The economics of enforcement select for reachable defendants, not for the most culpable ones.
For a platform, the questions become intermediary-liability questions — DMCA §512 safe harbour and its notice-and-takedown conditions for copyright, contributory and vicarious liability for trademark, and terms-of-service enforcement. Those are real defences, and they are conditional on actually running the process. What pump.fun is and how its launch mechanics work explains the volume that makes this a scale problem.
What it means if you are launching
You are the deployer. There is no anonymity defence — pseudonymity is a practical obstacle to being found, not a legal one, and chain analysis plus an off-ramp usually ends it.
Use art you made, art you licensed in writing, or art that is genuinely public domain and verified as such rather than assumed. Do not use a brand name or logo as your token's identity. Do not use a real person's name or face without written consent. If your entire concept is "the meme," commission a distinct original work that evokes the genre without reproducing a specific protected character. The complete guide to creating a memecoin and the token launch checklist cover the operational side; the IP question belongs before either, because it is the one thing you cannot fix after deployment.
Statutory damages for wilful copyright infringement in the US run up to $150,000 per work under 17 U.S.C. §504(c)(2), and a fee award is available in some circumstances. Against creator-fee revenue from a token that did nothing, that is not a rational trade.
What it means if you are holding
Buying a token is not infringement. You did not copy the artwork and you are not using the mark in commerce. Your risk is different and more mundane: it is that the IP claim damages the token.
A takedown removes the socials, the site and the imagery that constitute the entire product. A rights holder's public assertion is a sell signal to everyone who sees it. A platform delisting removes the venue where the token is discoverable. None of that touches the contract — the token keeps existing on-chain, tradeable, and worth whatever a thin market says it is worth. Treat an unresolved IP claim over a token's central image as a live operational risk on that token, not as a legal problem you personally have.
What this article does not cover
It is US-centred. Copyright is broadly harmonised through the Berne Convention, but trademark rights are territorial and must be asserted country by country, and right of publicity has no international equivalent — some jurisdictions handle it through personality or privacy rights instead, with different results.
It does not tell you whether a specific use is fair use, parody or nominative fair use. Those are fact-specific and decided by a court weighing factors.
And it makes no assessment of any live dispute's merits. A cease and desist is a demand letter — a claim, not an adjudication. The same is true of any takedown notice.
Frequently asked questions
Can you legally make a memecoin from a popular meme?
Only if you have rights to the specific artwork or the artwork is genuinely public domain. Copyright belongs to whoever created the image, and it is not lost through mass reposting — Matt Furie's Pepe litigation is the standing demonstration. Widespread unauthorised use by other people does not create a right for you.
Does using a meme in a token count as fair use?
Rarely. Fair use under 17 U.S.C. §107 is a defence decided on four factors, and using a whole character as the commercial identity of something you are selling sits badly on most of them. Parody that targets the original work is a stronger position; simply being funny while borrowing the work is not.
Can a brand force a memecoin to be delisted or taken down?
It can send takedown notices and cease-and-desist letters, and platforms frequently comply — Burwick Law's cease and desist to pump.fun covered 200-plus tokens at once. Nobody can remove a deployed contract from a blockchain, but removing the site, the socials and the listings usually removes the market.
Do I risk anything as a buyer of a token that infringes someone's IP?
Not infringement liability — you have not copied anything or used a mark in commerce. Your risk is that a takedown or public claim strips the token of its imagery, socials and listings, which is where most of its perceived value lives. Treat an open IP dispute as a real risk factor on that token.
Is using a celebrity's face on a token illegal?
It can breach their right of publicity, which is state law in the US — California Civil Code §3344 and New York Civil Rights Law §§50–51 are the commonly cited examples. That claim exists independently of copyright, trademark and any securities analysis, and it can run alongside fraud claims from buyers who believed the celebrity was involved.
Deploy something you actually own
If the artwork, name and story are yours, the IP question stops being a risk and becomes an asset. MintPlus — from TrustSwap, which also builds Meme Central — deploys a fixed-supply token with liquidity locked at creation on Ethereum, Robinhood Chain, Polygon, Base and BNB, so what you launch is auditable from the first block and surfaces with that lock recorded on its page in the Meme Central feed. It will not tell you whether your image infringes somebody's copyright, it will not clear a trademark for you, and a clean deployment is no defence to using art you had no right to use.
Nothing here is financial, legal or tax advice. Memecoins are extremely high-risk: most lose most of their value, and the majority of tokens launched never reach a decentralised exchange at all. Never spend money you cannot afford to lose entirely. Meme Central does not recommend any specific token. Data described as Meme Central's own reflects tokens indexed by Meme Central and is not whole-market data.
This article is general information about a fast-moving area of law and was last reviewed on 31 August 2026. It is not legal or tax advice, rules differ materially by jurisdiction, and your facts matter. Consult a qualified attorney or accountant before acting.
