Memes are powerful partly because nobody asks permission to use them.
That makes them spread quickly. It also makes them difficult to organize commercially once they become valuable.
Mumu the Bull is now sitting directly inside that tension.
The character developed in 4chan’s /biz/ culture in 2018 as the bullish counterpart to Bobo the Bear. Like most durable memes, Mumu accumulated meaning through repetition. The community did not need a style guide to know what the character represented.
Now the current Mumu project has filed trademark applications around both the name and character. MUMU is listed under IP Australia Application 2682039 and MUMU THE BULL under Application 2682957. The project says the filings cover digital media and NFT-authenticated works, apparel and entertainment branding.
The filings are not the same as granted registrations, but they represent a clear attempt to establish an official commercial layer around something that historically lived in open meme culture.
The benefit is practical.
An official brand can make it easier to identify legitimate merchandise, organize licensing, work with partners and challenge direct commercial impersonation. For a character with years of online recognition, those are practical problems rather than theoretical ones.
The risk is overcorrecting. The value of Mumu was created by people sharing and redrawing him. Any brand strategy that treats every meme as infringement would work against the mechanism that built the character in the first place.
The more interesting model is selective protection: defend the official brand identity while allowing community participation to keep expanding the culture.
That approach could become increasingly common as older internet characters move into crypto.
Memecoins have turned meme ownership from an obscure legal issue into an economic one. As more money gathers around recognizable characters, the question of authenticity becomes harder to ignore.
Mumu is one of the clearest examples because its cultural history is older than its current token identity.
The bull belonged to the internet first. The project is now trying to define what “official” means without forgetting why the character mattered.
References: IP Australia - MUMU Application 2682039 | IP Australia - MUMU THE BULL Application 2682957 search