When a Trademark Complaint Can Cost More Than a Listing

Most trademark disputes never reach a courtroom. For small sellers on global marketplaces, they can end with an email from the platform: a listing is removed, an account metric changes, and sometimes years of built-up standing disappear.

That is what happened to Sam Joseph Karam, an Etsy seller, in a recent dispute over the word "bruh." Malik Yawar Abbas registered BRUH with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office in July 2025 and subsequently filed complaints against Karam's listings. Eleven of Karam's designs were removed, and he lost his Star Seller badge. According to CBC, Karam also saw an immediate drop in sales.

Abbas told CBC that he was seeking $1,000 as part of a proposed settlement. It was not paid, and no monetary settlement was reached. Abbas has described BRUH as a "licensing-only brand," with mock-ups but no actual goods for sale, and said he later withdrew the complaint to Etsy after the designs were removed and the products were no longer offered to Canadian consumers.

There is an obvious question about whether someone should be able to claim trademark rights in a word like "bruh." What interests me more is what happens after a registration exists.

The eleven removed listings are one thing. Losing a Star Seller badge is another. A seller's reputation on a marketplace is built over time, and it shapes how customers perceive the shop and how the shop performs. When that status disappears because of an intellectual property complaint, the consequences reach well past the specific product that was challenged.

Etsy is not a court. Its enforcement system responds to complaints and notices under its own policies. It does not determine whether the underlying use actually infringes a valid trademark. Yet from the seller's side, the practical consequences arrive long before any court is involved.

The seller loses listings, loses marketplace status, loses sales, and struggles to get the decision reconsidered. Karam told CBC that Etsy gave him no way to appeal. The imbalance is straightforward: the trademark owner has a mechanism for making a complaint, and the seller has almost nothing for challenging what follows.

Which raises a question about the registration itself.

When someone buys a T-shirt with "bruh" printed across the front, they are not being told anything about the source of that shirt. The word is part of the design. It's decorative, expressive, or funny rather than functioning as a brand.

That distinction matters in trademark law. Protection is concerned with uses that identify the source of goods or services. A word appearing on a shirt does not become a trademark simply because someone registered it.

The United States has developed a substantial body of law around ornamental use, covering exactly these situations where words or designs on clothing are treated as decoration rather than as marks. American law doesn't determine what happens in Canada, and Canadian courts have their own framework for assessing use and infringement. But the comparison highlights something that gets awkward on a global marketplace.

Etsy is global. Trademark rights are territorial. A seller can create one design, upload it once, and make it available in dozens of countries. The legal position can differ depending on where the seller is, where the customer is, and where someone has obtained rights.

The seller navigates all of that alone. Most small Etsy sellers don't have an international trademark department. They have a shop and some listings. When something goes wrong, the first indication is an email telling them a listing has been removed.

The law and the platform are asking different questions. The seller absorbs the consequences of both at once.

The bad-faith issue makes the Canadian case more interesting. Carys Craig of York University told CBC that the way the mark was presented, together with the pattern of takedowns, "might be enough to reach the standard of bad faith." She also emphasized that the standard is largely untested in Canada. That qualification matters. It isn't a finding that the registration was obtained in bad faith. It's an observation that the circumstances might eventually meet the threshold.

The circumstances are still worth examining. When a trademark is presented as a licensing vehicle rather than a brand that sells anything, and the registration then becomes the basis for complaints against sellers using an ordinary word, it raises a fair question about what the registration was for.

I spent eight years on the other end of this system.

My band's name, The Slants, went through an eight-year process with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, which argued the whole time that the name carried too much meaning to register. That was a different country and a different statute, so the cases aren't equivalent. But the contrast has stayed with me. I lived inside a system that spent years scrutinizing the meaning and distinctiveness of a name. Then a word used constantly in ordinary speech and printed on shirts everywhere clears registration and becomes the basis for complaints against multiple sellers.

That inconsistency doesn't prove the USPTO was wrong about my band or that CIPO was wrong about BRUH. It says something about how the system feels to the people who have to live inside it.

Most trademark commentary lives in courtrooms. Most small online sellers will never see one. Their trademark dispute begins and ends with a platform notification.

That doesn't mean platforms shouldn't enforce intellectual property rights. They have legitimate reasons to respond to rights holders, and expecting every complaint to reach a judge is unrealistic.

But there should be more recognition of what a takedown actually does. Removing a product is one consequence. Removing a seller's accumulated standing, cutting their sales, and offering no meaningful appeal is something considerably larger.

It also seems reasonable to ask whether platform enforcement should account for the nature of the alleged use. A word functioning as a brand is different from a word printed decoratively on a shirt. A registration in one country is different from a legal determination that a product infringes everywhere a platform operates. Those distinctions disappear when a complicated question of territorial trademark law gets reduced to a platform notification.

The "bruh" dispute isn't a story about who owns a word. It's a story about what happens when a government registration meets a private platform's enforcement system, and how much damage lands in the space between a complaint and an actual legal determination.

That space is becoming an increasingly important part of intellectual property law, even though it rarely looks like law from the seller's side.

It looks like an email from Etsy.


Simon Tam is the founder of The Slants and the central figure in Matal v. Tam (2017), the unanimous Supreme Court decision that struck down the government's power to deny trademarks on disparagement grounds. He speaks on First Amendment and intellectual property issues nationally. For information on bringing him to speak, visit simontam.org/speaking.