Kanye West Takes Legal Action Against CoinYe Cryptocurrency

Just days after news broke that the one and only Kanye West was set to get his own cryptocurrency, a la Bitcoin or Dogecoin, the makers of CoinYe West have been slapped with legal action, with Yeezy’s people issuing a cease and desist order.

K.Wizzle got the legal team straight on the case, with his attorney, Brad Rose, writing that the use of the rapper’s image is a clear case of trademark infringement. “Given Mr. West’s wide-ranging entrepreneurial accomplishments, consumers are likely to mistakenly believe that Mr. West is the source of your services.”

They’ve also directed the CoinYeezy team to hand over their website and shut down their Facebook and Twitter accounts, with Rose stating that his firm will “notify the cryptocurrency community at large of your infringing actions and pursue all legal remedies against any business that accepts the purported COINYE WEST currency.”

The anonymous developers behind CoinYe had already considered the possibility that the man himself would give the currency a nay vote, saying, “We’re really not sure how Kanye is gonna react to this. We hope he loves it, but if he doesn’t, he really isn’t someone we want to piss off.”

But they’ve decided to proceed full steam ahead anyway, tweeting “WHO GON STOP ME HUH” ? Coinye feelin’ the heat, gonna spread what we got so far before the bigwigs steal our work!!” They’ve pushed the launch forward to January 7th at 7pm PST (January 8th, 2pm AEDT), moved the domain to India, and changed the currency name to simply CoinYe.

And Kanye’s not the only one accusing the CoinYe team of illegal behaviour, with designer Jag Nagra of Page 84 Design stating that the image of K.West previously used on the cryptocurrency was stolen from his 365 Illustrations project. He tweeted “FYI @kanyewest I’m not affiliated with @CoinyeWest. They stole an illo of you from my art project and slapped it on their logo. Thieves!” The image has since been changed and no longer resembles Jag’s work.

(via Consequence Of Sound)