Josh Gerben and Eric Perrott Discuss Jimothy IP Rights with Bloomberg

After the internet fell in love with Jimothy, a racoon with a shortened spine, Jimothy-themed merchandise began flooding the market.

Josh Gerben and Eric Perrott spoke with Bloomberg about who, if anyone, owns the rights to Jimothy merch.

“I don’t see it being something that anyone can claim rights to,” said Eric Perrott, a trademark and copyright attorney at Gerben IP.

Viral phenomena like Jimothy move too fast for anybody to easily claim exclusive rights, he said.

Comparisons to other viral animals like Grumpy Cat or Doge don’t hold up because those memes had an identifiable owner from the start, Perrott said.

“They weren’t protecting the idea of a cat named Grumpy Cat,” he said. “They were protecting the videos that they produced, the content they produced under that name.”

Jimothy can’t be controlled by any one source, Perrott said.

A trademark must be able to tell consumers who is behind a product or service, said Josh Gerben, trademark attorney and founder of Gerben IP. “The name of the raccoon, in all likelihood, and a general image of the raccoon drawn however you would, would not theoretically be possible to be protected as a trademark,” he said.

The only person who might have a claim, is the person who named the raccoon and filmed the original video.

But proving it would mean showing that consumers associate “Jimothy” specifically with her, not just with the raccoon — a high bar to clear once a name has gone fully viral, Gerben said.

“It can be very hard to recapture certain rights with trademarks once a name is part of the general vernacular,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re the one that even said it first,” Gerben said, describing how the US Patent and Trademark Office has reasoned on similar applications in the past. “This is what everybody’s using, so you can’t protect it as a trademark.”

With Jimothy’s image already on coffee mugs, onesies, and T-shirts from vendors with no connection to each other, he said, any single trademark owner has a challenging case to make.

While there could be copyright claims against people reusing the original video, “the minute they go to a clip art picture, or they draw one of their own,” they get around the issue, Gerben said.

Source: Sharma, Riya. https://www.news.bloomberglaw.com. “Jimothy the Raccoon’s Popularity Undermines the Right to Own Him”. 30 July 2026.