PLEASANT GROVE, Utah (KTVX) — A Utah business owner is suing pop star Taylor Swift for trademark infringement.
Federal court documents filed in the Utah District Court show Ken Bretschneider, the chief executive officer of Evermore Park in Pleasant Grove, Utah, has filed a lawsuit against Swift over her latest album “Evermore.”
Documents filed Tuesday show 12 pieces of evidence supporting Bretschneider’s case, including Google search results for Evermore, items of clothing with branding and two letters from Swift’s counsel.
In the declaration filing, Bretschneider says the Utah theme park “has invested approximately $37,000,000 into the creation and promotion of Evermore Park and the EVERMORE trademarks.” That includes paying for advertising and promoting, purchasing the EVERMORE.COM domain and labor costs for advertising and promoting.
Since opening its doors in 2018, Bretschneider says, the theme park has welcomed over 140,000 guests. “Willow,” one of the songs on Swift’s album, has garnered over 124 million streams on Spotify alone.
Evermore Park also has “commissioned the creation of two original music scores that Evermore sells under the EVERMORE trademark through a variety of outlets, such as Apple Music.”
The lawsuit includes documents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office showing Evermore Park’s trademarks for clothing and the amusement park.
According to the album cover for Swift’s “evermore,” the album came after the singer-songwriter “just kept writing [tales]” stemming from “folklore,” her previous album.
PHOTOS: Utah’s Evermore Park
Bretschneider has also included a cease-and-desist letter sent to Swift over her “pending applications including the EVERMORE trademark” dating back to mid-December 2020, just days after the album was released.
Andrea Measom, Evermore Park’s director of human resources, said she was asked by guests after the album release “whether the Evermore Album was the result of a collaboration between Evermore and Taylor Swift or some other type of relationship.” Other Evermore Park staff said the web traffic on their site “spiked dramatically” when Swift’s album was released.
The suit continues, adding that before the album was released, Evermore Park’s website was in the top results of a Google search of “evermore.” After the album release, that was no longer the case.
Swift’s legal team says the claims of trademark infringement are baseless, adding that the addition of “Taylor Swift … Album” around evermore makes the trademark different, which is allowed under U.S. law. They added that while the theme park frequently uses an all upper-case spelling of Evermore, the album uses a lower-case spelling.
In a letter to Evermore Park’s legal team, Swift’s legal team includes screengrabs of Twitter posts — which appear to have since been deleted — in which Evermore Park has “intentionally traded off and taken advantage of this alleged attention in a transparent attempt to try to create an association between your client and ours.”
In a second letter, Swift’s legal team said, “There is no basis for your client’s claim that the Swift Parties’ use of the term ‘evermore’ infringes any trademark rights it may have.”
Swift has faced other pushback over her songs, including “Shake It Off” and, most recently, accusations about the ‘folklore’ logo being copied from a Black-owned business called The Folklore.
There are no future hearings related to this lawsuit at this time.