Royal jam, the little guy and Meghan's latest Big Mistake.

Oh, dear. Meghan Markle has made another oopsie.

She's changed the name of her jammy business from one that's already taken to another one that's already taken, and never have so many people been quite so expert at copyright law.

If you're not up to speed, here's the topline: On Tuesday, Meghan posted a video to her newly-invigorated Instagram feed to tell us that her lifestyle brand American Riveria Orchard was being re-named. It is now called As Ever. This was after soliciting hundreds of thousands of email addresses (including mine, obvs) but before any jam materialised. As Ever, Meghan told us, is a partnership with Netflix, alongside her lifestyle show With Love, Meghan, which premieres in a couple of weeks.

Watch: The official trailer for With Love, Meghan. Post continues after video.

The idea is to make Meghan's aspirational Martha-meets-Gwyneth show "shoppable". According to the trademark claim, products would include candles, tea-towels, birdseed, meditation blankets and, of course, jam. "Jam is my jam," she said in the video. Same.

But by Wednesday, a New York clothing company had posted a giant exclamation mark on their Instagram feed, because they are also called As Ever, and they suddenly had a lot of new followers. The Brooklyn-based label is small, but classy. Their crisp white shirt looks exactly like one Meghan would wear, and retails for US$225. 'As Ever NYC''s post threatened no legals (yet), but the message was clear — we're the little guy, and this intellectual property is ours.

For Meghan, it's deja-vu. American Riveria Orchard ran into its own copyright issues. You can't copyright a place or its nickname, apparently.

The small print of licensing agreements is rarely the stuff of celebrity headlines, but when any stoush involves a famous woman straying from her lane, we all have MBAs. Remember Kylie Jenner, who tried to legally protect her first name until Minogue got involved? Kim Kardashian, who had to change the name of her shapewear line from KIMono to the now globally-dominating SKIMS? Gwyneth Paltrow, who tried to get away with a line called Good Clean GOOP when there was already one called Good Clean Love? Yep, all that.

It's fun, after all, criticising famous people who want us to spend money on their stuff. Because they already have plenty of money, and it's annoying that they seem to want more of ours, meaning we would have less, but maybe some jam.

And it's particularly fun to jump on the critique train of your favourite least-favourite famous person when you've run out of other things to attack them for. When it's become too awkward to jump into the sewer of steaming racist sludge constantly directed at them on X, for example. Or because they no longer "take money from the taxpayer", or when they actually listened to the constant entreaties to "just go away for a while".

All of those things apply to the Duchess of Sussex, who can, for many, do no right.

Her strategic retreat since the initial flurry of post-royal publicity — the Meghan and Harry doco, the Spotify podcast — has made her a scarce celebrity resource. Her husband's many lawsuits against the world's biggest media companies — he's sued News, Associated Newspapers, The Mirror Group — have baked in animosity in powerful places.

And yet here Meghan is, coming back for more. Posting. Linking. Taking up space on your phone.

She's turned off comments, so she doesn't have to look at your abuse, but she still wants something from you: Likes. Data. Eyeballs. Dollar bills. Attention.

And here we are, poised to be mad about it.

Trending above Trump on X as I type this? #MeghanMarkleIsAConArtist

So with all that in mind — the target on her back, a media primed against her, the hateful bots on perpetual standby — how does the Meghan Markle Machine keep making such basic mistakes?

Using the name of a small bespoke fashion brand is a gotcha for the privilege police. Here comes Her Royal Entitlement, trampling the little guy. Again.

Having to rebrand at all, 10 months after the announcement of a name no-one could remember without shifting a single unit, seems like the sort of rookie error your contemporary celebrity mogul — Rihanna, Selena, even JLo — would never.

And it's confusing, yes? The show is called With Love, Meghan. The brand is called As Ever. The umbrella organisation is called Archewell, which is both a foundation and a production company. The official royal office still exists — although who knows how or why — and can be found at sussex.com.

Meghan Markle's lifestyle brand is now called 'As Ever'. Image: Instagram @aseverofficial.

All this clutter buys into the narrative that Meghan and her husband are professional influence-seekers but amateur business people. In the recent sprawling cover story Vanity Fair ran without the couple's involvement, the main accusations were that they didn't know what they wanted. To be "of service", like royals? Or brand-building moguls, like Oprah? They kept changing their minds, the writer Anna Peele's mostly-unnamed sources reported. And they trusted no-one.

Understandable. With Harry's background — his own family leaking against him, blurred lines between competition and brotherly love, a mother venerated as a saint by the same press-pack who chased her to her death — how could trust be easy to come by?

But to operate at the highest levels of Hollywood Moguldom, "one" needs to trust people who know more about the business than you do. Ideally a team of them, and ideally a team that doesn't keep turning over every few months, as reports have persistently suggested Team Sussex does.

Still, this latest As Ever drama? Likely a ripple or two in an ethically-sourced tea-cup. Meghan, with her charming return to the grid and her show finally on the schedule, is clearly in her "let them" era.

She knows she is never going to convince the trolls and the insulted Fleet Street hacks and the affronted royal traditionalists to support and applaud her, so why not just get on with doing what you want to do regardless? And what Meghan wants to do is copyright edible flower petals.

It's become so basic and predictable to be anti-Meghan that she's likely to catch a weary public on the upswing. They've had a reality-check lately, after all, about what constitutes a crisis, and Famous Woman Swaps Jobs isn't really it.

And above all, it's an attention economy. That $225 white shirt on the original As Ever's website today? Sold out. So is everything else. You cannot buy the kind of publicity a hapless Duchess can send your way on a Tuesday afternoon.

And if Netflix manages to get its hands on some actual jars of jam before March 4, when With Love, Meghan drops, they will be sold out, too.

Let them snipe, Meghan. I have already signed up for the edible flower petals. Whatever they are.

Read more from Holly Wainwright:

• ASK HOLLY: 'How do I stop helicoptering my son when he seems so hopeless?'

• HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: 'The most daring thing about Babygirl isn't the sex.'

• HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: 'Why I'm having a Year of "Nup".'

Feature image: Netflix/Instagram @aseverofficial/Canva.