Hailey Baldwin, shortly after marrying Justin Bieber and becoming Hailey Bieber, filed for the trademark “Hailey Bieber” with the US Patent and Trademark Office. This is not uncommon, nor is it out of the ordinary that she filed for the trademark “Bieber Beauty” last week in case she wants to launch a beauty and cosmetics line.

Celebrities file trademark registrations all the time — for their names, their children’s names, their catchphrases, their song lyrics, and even, as was the case with former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow, their prayer posture.

Each time a celebrity seeks a trademark for something silly — or to use in a silly way, such as when Taylor Swift told the government she needed to register “Party Like It’s 1989” for use on everything from nail art to knitting needles to napkin rings to Christmas tree skirts — there’s a barrage of news coverage. The hubris! The ego! We simply cannot believe that Taylor Swift has a real, valorous business incentive to protect the phrase “Party Like It’s 1989” as it would appear on a household object she quite clearly has no real intent to ever manufacture.

In the age of Instagram and reality TV and a wildly unstable music industry, it makes some sense that our models and pop stars and influencers must now be ruthless capitalists and expert businesspeople, but it isn’t always clear what the rules are. Can Swift really dash off an email to the government and claim the phrase “This Sick Beat” is hers and hers alone until the end of time? Are celebrities going to file trademark applications for every possible phrase in the English language, leaving nothing for the rest of us? How does this game actually work?

Famous people have been trademarking their names for several decades now, but the personal brand era has made it more complicated.

First of all, we have a quick clarification from David Clark, a commercial litigation and intellectual property lawyer based in Houston. I emailed him with some questions about celebrities getting their names trademarked, and he replied, “These celebrities are not ‘getting trademarks.’ They are seeking to acquire trademark registrations. Which is a vastly different thing.”

“Famous people want to control as many parts of their persona as possible in the marketplace.”

A trademark, he explained, exists as soon as you use a name, logo, word, phrase, or design. As soon as Taylor Swift said “This Sick Beat” and the public identified it as something she says — a signifier that a product with those words on it would be coming from her — it was a trademark.

“A trademark registration, meanwhile, may be granted by the US PTO and also at the state level for these trademarks that are actively in use.” The reason to secure a trademark registration is to have the formal upper hand in any legal dispute, and, a little bit, to show off.

The biggest celebrities started registering trademarks for their names around the same time publicity rights and likeness rights came into play, Clark says. One of the first pop stars to protect her name and likeness was Madonna in the 1980s, and one of the most influential trademark cases involving a celebrity name was the 1998 battle between Elvis Presley’s estate and a dive bar in Houston called The Velvet Elvis. (It is now called The Velvet Melvin.)

Last December, William McGeveran, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, published an essay in the Houston Law Review coining the term “selfmarks.” In the age of personal brands and influencers, he wrote, more and more famous people were obligated to register more diverse trademarks for their names. They realized they could make money off themselves without explicitly selling a traditional product, and trademark registrations give them the power to do so without worrying about someone else taking advantage of the opportunity.

“Famous people want to control as many parts of their persona as possible in the marketplace,” he told me in an email. “Under traditional rules you had to be marketing some product like apparel or perfume, but now it is easier to get a trademark for ‘endorsement services,’ which is really a trademark in yourself.” Kim Kardashian has a trademark for Kim Kardashian endorsement services as well as one for Kim Kardashian promotional appearances. This means nobody else can go to a party or hold up a bag of tummy tea and make money by invoking the trademark “Kim Kardashian.”

Married names are difficult to register for, but only if you have litigious in-laws.

In April 2017, the Kardashians established another precedent in modern celebrity trademark. Kourtney, Kim, and Khloé — under their corporations 2Die4Kourt, Kimsaprincess Inc., and Khloemoney Inc. — banded together to block Blac Chyna, then engaged to their brother Rob Kardashian, from registering the trademark for her planned married name Angela Kardashian.

“Kardashian has grown to be a valuable name brand and trademark through the fame generated by that family.”

Why did Hailey Baldwin succeed where Blac Chyna failed? The cases are apples and oranges, according to Clark. “First, the name ‘Kardashian’ does not immediately conjure up Blac Chyna in the minds of the consuming public. It most likely makes you think of Kim and her sisters. Kardashian has grown to be a valuable name brand and trademark through the fame generated by that family,” he writes. “Blac Chyna likely was denied registration on grounds that her name was likely to confuse with that brand.”

That doesn’t mean she couldn’t have used her married name in public, just that she couldn’t sell any goods or services in the same sphere as the Kardashians and use their name to compete with them. “Her attempted use of ‘Angela Renee Kardashian’ for ‘advertising services’ and ‘entertainment services’ would be confusing for these specific reasons.”

In Clark’s opinion, Bieber is not as omnipresent a name as Kardashian, nor as distinctive. And Hailey will probably not try to “compete” with her husband.

Though plenty of celebrities try to register trademarks for their children’s names, it’s technically against the law to do so if you don’t plan on monetizing your child.

The Kardashians are also our best reference point for the trademark registration of children’s names. Kim Kardashian holds registrations for her three children — “North West,” “Saint West,” and “Chicago West” — and Kylie Jenner recently made headlines for filing paperwork for the trademarks “Stormi Webster” and “Stormiworld,” a portmanteau of her daughter’s name and her boyfriend Travis Scott’s most recent album Astroworld, which was also the theme of Stormi’s first birthday party. Crucially, to do so, Jenner has to say that there is an “intent to use” the trademark in commerce. Obviously, Stormi is an infant and not yet selling a Stormiworld clothing or cosmetics line, but Jenner can’t hold on to the trademark without promising to do so.

Beyoncé and Jay-Z are in a similar situation with the trademark applications they filed for their twins, “Rumi Carter” and “Sir Carter.” Under BGK Trademark Holdings, they’ve secured them both for now, but they have to regularly request extensions on actually using them. Eventually, if they don’t, the trademark office will reject them.

They never managed to secure the trademark for “Blue Ivy Carter” in part because a wedding planning business called Blue Ivy challenged it and because Jay-Z slipped up in a Vanity Fair interview in 2013, saying they applied for it only to keep someone else from making money off of their kid’s name. “[It] wasn’t for us to do anything. As you see, we haven’t done anything.”

What about catchphrases? “This Sick Beat” is not a registered trademark “That’s hot” is.

The funniest celebrity trademark cases are ones that involve catchphrases, obviously, because the idea of having a catchphrase is — on its face — ridiculous. There are some really good success stories in this space: NFL running back Marshawn Lynch owns the trademark for “I’m just here so I won’t get fined;” Paris Hilton successfully sued Hallmark for using her trademarked phrase “That’s hot” on a greeting card.

And there are some really good failure stories: Rachel Zoe does not own the trademark, despite her best efforts, for the phrase “I die.” Nor does Ryan Lochte own the trademark for the word “jeah.”

Swift, who has registered dozens of trademarks under her own name and under TAS Rights Management is probably the most widely circulated example of a celebrity attempting to gobble up trademark registrations. But she hasn’t really been as successful at it as the blogosphere has made her out to be. She filed for the trademark for “The 1989 World Tour” in April 2015, but it was not officially registered until January 2017, long after that tour was over. She has paid to file applications for trademarks like “Swiftmas” and then abandoned them, never filing a statement of use. “This Sick Beat,” “Party Like It’s 1989,” and “cause we never go out of style,” all of which were covered mockingly by the press, were also abandoned, seemingly without a fight.

Though Swift is known for her litigiousness and for cracking down on fan-made merchandise on Etsy, her actions around these trademark registrations are fairly lackadaisical. She does own “Blank Space,” her cats’ names, “the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now,” and all of her album titles, but she didn’t even send a statement of use for “Reputation” — her November 2017 album — to the PTO until last week.

“Taylor Swift might have the aspiration to sell all sorts of goods with ‘Shake It Off’ or ‘This Sick Beat,’ but she could only be granted a federal trademark if she could prove she already was,” says Madhavi Sunder, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, specializing in intellectual property. “I think what people think they can do with trademark and what they would like to do with trademark is not necessarily consistent with what trademark law actually allows. It’s not just about associating something with her. It’s about ‘Is this a mark that signals the source of the goods?’” This is likely why Swift has eased up, and why it took her so long to secure trademark registrations for key phrases from her latest album. First, she had to prove she was actually selling things with those words on them.

Are celebrity trademarks out of control?

Not every celebrity bothers with trademark registration — not because of the costs, which are negligible for someone who’s likely already paying a legal team — because the people most likely to make infringing merchandise are fans.

“Most celebrities don’t want to be in the position of going after their fans, because you can quickly turn a fan’s love into hate by suing them,” Sunder says. But there are some celebrities who think it’s still worth it, because having complete control of their merchandise seems so lucrative.

“You can quickly turn a fan’s love into hate by suing them.”

The incentives for most celebrities to register most things beyond the obvious — name, album titles, probably a logo — are small. And while it may seem like celebrities could start registering trademarks for every imaginable sentence and eventually own all the words, this is super illegal and not actually going to happen.

In the Harvard Law Review in 2018, NYU Law School professors Barton Beebe and Jeanne C. Fromer entertained the question “Are we running out of trademarks?” There have been 6.7 million trademark applications filed with the US PTO since 1985, according to the authors, and the system “is growing increasingly — perhaps inordinately — crowded, noisy, and complex.”

The government is not unaware of this problem. In 2012, the PTO started a two-year trial of a new system, in which trademark registrations would be randomly audited to see if they were actually being used as intended. During those two years, the office examined 500 registrations and determined that half were not being used in adherence to the law. Of those, 34 percent were rewritten to narrow the scope of goods and services they applied to, and 16 percent were cancelled entirely. In the paper’s conclusion, Beebe and Fromer call for an expansion of that program and suggest that, in the first place, the PTO “might also insist on more robust and direct evidence that applied-for descriptive marks have acquired distinctiveness.”

Though bloggers can continue to get riled up by Swift’s choices or find it unsavory for Jenner to plan to monetize her 1-year-old, trademark law is actually fairly well equipped to make sure the chips fall where they ought to.

“One of the fundamental rules we have in trademark law is ‘no hoarding of trademarks,’” Sunder says. “You can’t create a stash of the words in the English language that you might use someday. The trademark law completely forbids that.”

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