Kanye just can’t get a break.
The “Yeezus” rapper is currently in the middle of a legal fight against a digital currency that mockingly uses his name and image, the New York Post reports.
“Coinye,” as it’s called, was created by an anonymous group of Web developers, designed to rival Bitcoin, another digital currency that has seen relative success in the past year. The image of “Coinye” is a gold coin with an unflattering picture of the rapper on it—resulting in a cease and desist letter from the rapper’s lawyers.
“Mr West is an internationally renown musical artist, songwriter, producer, film director and fashion designer, to name just a few of Mr. West’s endeavours,” the document read. “Given Mr. West’s wide-ranging entrepreneurial accomplishments, consumers are likely to mistakenly believe that Mr. West is the source of your services.”
The letter prompted the group to launch the “crypto currency” on Tuesday at 7 p.m. as opposed to the original launch date of Jan. 11.
“We want to release this to the public before the man can try to crush it,” a coder of the currency said in a Skype text interview with the Wall Street Journal on Monday night. “They’ll still come after us, but that’s OK.”
Read more at the New York Post.