You Named Your Beer John Lemon. Now You Owe €100,000.

Aurélien Picard thought he had a clever name. His Brittany brewery, L’Imprimerie, made a lemon-ginger beer he called John Lemon. The label featured a caricature of John Lennon sporting glasses with lemon slices for lenses. The tagline was “Get Bock.” The beer sold well for five years.

Then in April 2026, lawyers for Yoko Ono sent a letter demanding that Picard immediately stop selling the beer. The threat: pay €100,000 in immediate fines plus €1,500 for every day he kept selling it. After negotiations, Picard was allowed to sell off roughly 5,000 remaining bottles before July 1, 2026. Then the beer was gone.

It was not even the first time this happened. In 2017, Ono forced a Polish beverage company to rename its John Lemon lemonade brand to “On Lemon,” after her lawyers threatened fines of up to 5,000 euros per day and 500 euros per bottle sold. She had registered the “John Lemon” trademark herself, specifically to prevent this kind of use.

Picard told reporters the whole thing felt unfair. He was paying tribute to a musician he admired. The name was a pun, obviously intentional, obviously affectionate. None of that mattered legally. When it comes to whether you infringed, intent is almost beside the point. Intent can matter when courts calculate damages. willful infringement can multiply what you owe.

For any business building a brand, the lesson is the same: run a trademark clearance search before you invest in a name, and register federally before you scale. The rest of this article explains exactly what that means and when it matters most.

A name that makes customers think of a famous person or brand creates the legal problem, regardless of whether you meant it as a tribute. Likelihood of confusion is what counts, and courts and trademark holders do not grade on sincerity.

Why Famous Names Get Trademark Protection

You might assume trademark law only protects businesses from direct competitors using identical names. That is a reasonable assumption, but it is too narrow.

Trademark law protects against two distinct harms. The first is likelihood of confusion: a consumer sees your brand and reasonably believes it comes from, or is associated with, someone else. Picard’s beer was not made by the Lennon estate. But a customer who picked it up off a shelf and thought “the Lennon people must have approved this” experienced exactly the confusion the law is designed to prevent.

The second harm is dilution. Famous marks get extra protection even when there is no realistic confusion. If your brand is so well-known that a third party using it for unrelated goods cheapens or blurs its distinctiveness, that is dilution. You do not have to be in the same industry. You do not have to be a direct competitor. Famous marks can reach across categories and industries entirely.

Names of famous deceased people can also be protected as trademarks, particularly when an estate has actively registered and maintained that protection. Yoko Ono registered the “John Lemon” mark specifically because the pun was an obvious target. Any brewer, lemonade maker, or lemon product seller using that wordplay was walking into a trap that had already been set.

The Clearance Process Most Small Businesses Skip

Here is the uncomfortable truth: most small business owners choose their brand name, check that a domain is available, and call it done. That is not a clearance search. It is a Google search. And it leaves enormous blind spots.

A proper trademark clearance has three components.

If you are building a brand and want to make sure the name is actually yours to use, our trademark attorneys can run a proper clearance search before you invest in packaging, signage, marketing, or inventory.

What “Fair Use” of a Name Actually Means

Picard’s defense, had he chosen to fight, might have included something like fair use or nominative use. These are real doctrines, but they are narrower than most people think.

Nominative fair use allows you to use someone’s trademark to refer to them accurately. A mechanic who says “I fix BMW cars” is using the BMW trademark, but that use is permitted because it is descriptive and necessary. A beer review site that mentions John Lemon by name is probably fine. A brewery that sells a product under that name as its own brand identity is a different matter entirely.

Fair use in the trademark context also covers descriptive or expressive use that is not used as a brand identifier. But the moment your use of someone’s name or likeness functions as a source identifier for your goods, you are in trademark territory. A logo featuring a Lennon caricature, a product name that is a deliberate wordplay on his name, and a tagline riffing on a Beatles song is not fair use. It is branding. And it belongs to whoever registered it.

The Math: Clearance vs. Rebranding

The strongest argument for doing trademark clearance before you launch is a simple cost comparison. Most business owners skip clearance because it feels like an unnecessary expense when everything else about starting a business costs money. That calculation changes when you price out the alternatives.

Picard had five years of business built around the John Lemon name. Five years of packaging, social media presence, tap handles, merchandise, and customer recognition. All of that had to go. The settlement let him sell off existing inventory. It did not reimburse him for any of it.

Even businesses that are not hit with a demand letter pay the price of skipping clearance. If you later want to expand, sell the business, raise capital, or franchise, a buyer or investor will do their own trademark due diligence. An unregistered, uncleared brand name is a liability that affects valuation and can kill deals entirely.

When to Trademark: Before You Scale, Not After

The most common pattern we see is a business owner who built something real, skipped federal registration to save money, and then finds themselves in a dispute at the worst possible time. Right before a product launch. Right after signing a distribution deal. Right when the brand finally has enough traction to be worth protecting.

That timing is not coincidence. Trademark disputes tend to surface when a brand gets visible enough to attract attention, which is exactly when you have the most to lose.

The right time to register is before you have invested heavily in a name. Ideally before you launch. At a minimum, before you scale into new markets or sign deals that depend on your brand having clean title.

Here are the situations where acting now matters most.

• Product businesses going to retail: Retailers and distributors will ask about trademark registration. Many require it before putting your product on shelves. If you have a food, beverage, or consumer product business, register before you start pitching retail.
• Service businesses expanding to new cities: Your reputation travels with your name. Common law rights in your home city do not protect you when you open a second location two states away. Federal registration does.
• Businesses approaching a sale or investment: Buyers and investors check trademark status in due diligence. An unregistered mark or an uncleared name creates risk that affects price and sometimes kills deals.
• Anyone building brand equity over time: The earlier you register, the earlier your priority date locks in. That date matters enormously if someone later tries to claim they were using a similar name first.

Iowa and Texas: State vs. Federal Registration

Both Iowa and Texas offer state trademark registration. State filings are cheaper and faster, and for a strictly local business with no plans to grow, they provide a baseline level of protection within that state. But the limitations are significant.

The practical reality for Iowa and Texas business owners is this: if you sell anything online, ship to customers in other states, or plan to grow beyond your home market, a state trademark registration leaves you exposed. A competitor in another state can build rights under your name in their market, then file federally and block your expansion. You could be forced to rebrand in the very markets you were planning to enter next.

State registration makes the most sense as a tactical first step while a federal application is pending, or for a genuinely hyperlocal operation with no growth ambitions. For anyone else, federal registration is not an upgrade. It is the baseline.

Our Momentum membership includes access to flat-fee trademark services so you can protect your brand without unpredictable legal bills. If you want to understand your options before committing to anything, schedule a free consultation and we will walk through exactly what makes sense for your situation.

Common Mistakes That Create Trademark Problems

• Domain check as clearance: Checking whether a domain name is available tells you nothing about trademark rights. A domain can be available while a nearly identical trademark is already registered and enforceable.
• Assuming puns are safe: Picard’s story is a lesson in exactly this mistake. A pun on a famous name is still an evocation of that name. Courts and trademark holders read the intent in the wordplay, and they do not find it charming.
• Skipping the clearance because the name “feels” original: Feeling like your name is creative does not mean no one else has rights to something similar. The USPTO database has millions of registrations. Professional clearance is the only way to know.
• Waiting until you are profitable to register: Trademark filing fees are a few hundred dollars. But the total cost -- search, filing, monitoring -- adds up to more than that. Surge offers trademark registration on a 12-month payment plan, starting at $140 per month, so you do not have to have cash on hand to get real protection. Waiting until you can “afford” to register usually means waiting until you can least afford a problem.
• Registering only in one class when you operate in several: Trademark protection is class-specific. If you sell both a product and a service under the same name, you may need registrations in multiple classes to fully protect the brand.

Aurélien Picard is still brewing beer. He just has to do it under a different name. That is the best-case outcome from a trademark dispute: you survive, you rebuild, and you learn an expensive lesson. Many businesses do not get even that.

The lesson for Iowa and Texas business owners is simple. Your brand name is an asset. It is worth protecting before someone else takes it, or before you unknowingly build it on a foundation someone else already owns. A trademark clearance search and a federal registration application are not optional steps for ambitious small businesses. They are the cost of entry into a market where your name actually belongs to you.

If you are not sure whether your brand name is safe to use, or whether your existing trademark coverage is adequate, our attorneys can help you find out. Get in touch for a free consultation and we will tell you exactly where you stand.