All the fuss over plagiarism regarding the Tokyo Olympic emblem included examples of how Puma’s logo has been plagiarized. A company in Hokkaido created a parody brand for clothing called “Kuma”, which means bear. Thus a figure of a bear is placed at the same location as the cat in the Puma logo.
In this case, the Japan Patent Office ruled in favor of Puma and thus forbade Nihon Kanko Shoji from further use of the Kuma logo.
This reminded me of these funny stickers that I used to collect when they were popular in the US in the 1970s – Wacky Packages. These were definite parodies of real brands. I have no idea whether Wacky Packages ever got into IP difficulty, but I loved them as a kid.
