Graffiti artists have a different description for the burger chain’s faux-graffiti plastered walls: copyright infringement.

The design scheme, officially titled “Extreme” in McDonald’s brochures, is meant to target youthful consumers by using “graffiti-like visual language on the walls to remind people that McDonald’s is a brand of the streets,” as the company’s former chief brand strategist for Europe explained.

What McDonald’s may not have anticipated is that the street is undergoing its own branding revolution. Artists who view the urban landscape as a giant canvas are no longer outlaws in the dusk, but are increasingly showcased in museums and galleries and pursued by deep-pocketed art buyers. The embrace of graffiti has made artists more possessive of their designs, more sensitive to their reputation and, along with the higher stakes, more inclined to sue.

McDonald’s is the defendant in the latest of a growing handful of graffiti copyright clashes. In one recent case, the plaintiff is the former girlfriend of the late rebel artist Dash Snow. The suit accuses McDonald’s of painting him as a corporate sellout and putting his legacy at risk.

Jade Berreau, the administrator of his estate and mother of his only child, alleges that hundreds of McDonald’s restaurants across the globe are adorned with replica images of “SACE”—the tag, or signature, used by Mr. Snow. He died in 2009 at the age of 27.

Mr. Snow, the lawsuit says, would never have consented to what it calls a “brazen” misappropriation of the Soho artist’s “original graphic expression.”

“Nothing is more antithetical to Mr. Snow’s outsider ‘street cred,’ ” says the complaint, filed last week in Los Angeles federal court, “than association with corporate consumerism—of which McDonald’s and its marketing are the epitome.”

McDonald’s said its graffiti décor, which also includes scrawl on hanging light fixtures, is one of a dozen interior-design motifs recently introduced as part of a broader re-imaging of stores. A company spokeswoman declined to comment on the litigation.

A similar infringement action was brought against the company in March by Eric Rosenbaum, a Los Angeles tattoo artist also known as Norm. He alleged in federal court there that McDonald’s ripped off a graffiti work he titled “N-O-R-M Fire Escape on Bartlett” over boarded-up windows on a vacant Brooklyn building.

Mr. Rosenbaum said he spotted an image that looked suspiciously like “Norm” on a wall at a Tokyo McDonald’s several years ago. Similar “tags,” or letters in graffiti parlance, are splashed on McDonald’s walls in France and London, too.

Mr. Rosenbaum doesn’t object to the commodification of his work. “Since 2000, Norm has been a street artist for hire,” his complaint says, listing companies such as Coca-Cola Co. and Rockstar Inc. as past employers.

The problem, his lawyers contended, was that McDonald’s alleged “unauthorized use” of Norm stained his reputation and caused the artist to lose several six-figure licensing deals and contracts.

Mr. Rosenbaum’s lawyers withdrew the lawsuit in May. They declined to elaborate.

The plaintiff in the Snow case, meanwhile, appears to be digging in.

“Our highest priority is securing the immediate removal of this artwork from all McDonald’s stores to prevent any further trauma to Dash’s family or his legacy,” said Jeff Gluck, the lawyer representing Ms. Berreau.

Art dealer Jeffrey Deitch, former director of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, said some street artists are so antiestablishment that they refuse to allow their work to be displayed at all. Others, he said, are more amenable and will work for a corporation—if they feel the project has “the right attitude” and authenticity. Commercial misuse can be “morally offensive to them,” said Mr. Deitch.

An early booster of the genre, Mr. Deitch, while at MOCA, co-curated a major exhibit of graffiti and other street art. In New York, he invited Mr. Snow and collaborator Dan Colen to turn his Grand Street gallery into a giant hamster nest.

Mr. Snow, a scion of arts aristocracy (he was a great-grandson of French-American arts patron and oil-industry heiress Dominique de Menil), acquired a reputation as the “ Kurt Cobain” of the New York gallery world.

As a teen, he roamed subway tunnels and rooftops, snapping Polaroids and spraying his “SACE” tag. His photographs, collages and sculptures often contained scabrous images of sex and hard drugs, or featured his own body fluids.

Some art critics see Mr. Snow as a shock-mongering poseur. His admirers say he effectively captured a post-9/11 sense of angst and doom. Museums like the Whitney in New York and London’s Saatchi Gallery have also promoted his work. One piece, a defiled New York Post cover of Saddam Hussein, sold for $8,000 last month at Sotheby’s. Other Snow works have commanded six figures.

Mr. Snow’s mystique also extended to his reckless lifestyle, which ultimately doomed him. In July 2009, his family confirmed reports that he had died of a drug overdose.

The perceived association with McDonald’s has “diminished the value of Mr. Snow’s work,” Ms. Berreau’s complaint alleges. In a statement made through her lawyer, she said that suing was a last resort.

Ms. Berreau’s lawsuit alleges “straightforward copyright infringement.”

But proving that may not be so simple, said Christopher Buccafusco, an intellectual-property scholar at Cardozo School of Law in New York who isn't involved in the case.

For Ms. Berreau to prevail, he said, she’ll have to show that McDonald’s interior designers copied the “SACE” logo and also prove that the tag in question possesses an originality distinguishable from generic graffiti.

“Courts and the U.S. Copyright Office have been pretty resistant to the notion that the design of letters is copyrightable,” the professor said.

If McDonald’s prevails, that won’t guarantee a win in the court of public opinion. The company was on the defensive earlier this year when a Brixton location in South London got a graffiti makeover.

Some residents saw it as misguided pandering. “In an inner-city area like Brixton, tagging is a bit of blight,” said Jay Rayner, restaurant critic for London’s Observer and longtime Brixton resident. While he admires some graffiti in the area as “fantastic,” he deems McDonald’s indoor-tagging to be “just a bit crass.”

A McDonald’s spokeswoman defended the aesthetic, saying that the new look had been generally well received.

(Published by The Wall Street Journal - October 12, 2016)