EUIPO's Board of Appeals Grants Trademark To Banksy's Monkey

“Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge” reads Banksy’s famous Monkey with a sandwich board around its neck, which first came around in 2002 and was first commissioned by a nightclub in Brighton. 

These artworks have been used in various situations and backgrounds including the Parliament, showing Banksy’s political activism and ideologies. 

The same Monkey motif has been again in the news recently and it is an overruling of the earlier decision of 2020. In 2019, a greeting card company named Full Colour Black claimed that Pest Control, the authenticating group of Banksy which had filed for the trademark of the Monkey before the EUIPO had done so in bad faith. The Greeting Card company relied largely on the freely available artworks of Banksy for their business. Trademarks always needed separate applications unlike copyrights and it is imperative that artworks of Banksy were always copyright protected.

The EUIPO’s Board of Appeals in this case found that the company Full Colour Black could not prove how the trademark filing was in “ bad faith” by the EUTM proprietor, that is Pest Control and therefore allowed Banksy to continue to remain anonymous, while his monkey was granted the trademark. 

Banksy had always spoken up for the fact that art is free and that copyright is for the ‘losers’. However, this never meant that the judgments could be against him when he files for trademark registration. 

IP Attorney Nandita Saikia says, "Artists may be anonymous and it's obvious that works of art may be used as trademarks. However, asserting any kind of intellectual property rights where an author's or owner's anonymity in the public eye is involved can be a challenge not least due to procedural concerns and evidentiary issues relating to attribution. So, the decision of the EUIPO's Board of Appeal confirming that Banksy's monkey trademark is valid is welcome: it helps provide indicators of how rights can potentially be protected in cases with comparable factual matrices."

Thus, this shall act as a precedence for all such street arts where the artists intend to create a trademarked signature motif and remain anonymous.