Disney and Deadmau5 Are Feuding About Smiling Mice and It’s Pretty Great

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Published

September 5, 2014

The Feud is very much on between DJ for hire at your next wake, Dead Mouse Five – professionally known as Deadmau5 – and the architects of your childhood dreams, The Walt Disney Company, who have only now just discovered Deadmau5, apparently, and are threatening to get all kinds of litigious up in here, right after the following drop.

Per a report in Variety, Disney have filed a formal objection with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office with the intention of refusing a 2013 trademark that would formalise Joel Zimmerman’s use of circles, smiles and mouse imagery in his signature decade old logo and #stronglook personal branding.

Mice, of course, were invented by Disney’s namesake creator Walter, who on the Sixth Day was spontaneously like, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind,” and it was so. Soon after, in 1928, Mickey Mouse made his screen debut in a test screening of Plane Crazy; circles and smiling followed soon after as an unequivocal consequence of Mickey’s inception.

Zimmerman has responded in an appropriate fashion to the assertion that his mouse “is nearly identical in appearance, connotation and overall commercial impression to Disney’s” and that “the trademark designation was likely to cause confusion and dilution of [Disney’s] own marks,” resulting in “confusion and damage” of the Disney brand.

That could be said to be especially true for Deadmau5 and Disney’s mutual target demographic: children under the age of 5, for whom one logo is largely inseparable from the other due to their inability to distinguish between shape, colour, and sound; cartoon mouse and EDM DJ logo, with much certainty.

Here’s the latest from Zimmerman:

anyone wanna see some complete pwnage?

— deadmau5 (@deadmau5) September 4, 2014

okay mouse, http://t.co/zT7tTLffFw i never gave disney a liscene to use my track. So. we emailed you a C&D. @disney

— deadmau5 (@deadmau5) September 4, 2014

So now, @disney is illegally using my work… and CONFUSING people that id actualyly work with these twats.

— deadmau5 (@deadmau5) September 4, 2014

oh, @disney just in case you dont check your email, ill just leave this here. pic.twitter.com/I9ZSHsKlWV

— deadmau5 (@deadmau5) September 4, 2014

… @disney sorry heres the second page! Have a magical fucking day! pic.twitter.com/fGQf6jMOAc

— deadmau5 (@deadmau5) September 4, 2014

lets test a theory, it takes em 10 years to oppose a trademark, lets see how long it takes em to take down a video.

— deadmau5 (@deadmau5) September 4, 2014