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Baseball Primer Newsblog — The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand Sunday, March 26, 2023Red Sox drop trademark applications for ‘Boston’, blame MLB
RoyalsRetro (AG#1F)
Posted: March 26, 2023 at 05:33 PM | 19 comment(s)
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1. A triple short of the cycleEDIT: Ludicrouse is the worst rapper name ever.
There are many holidays that Maryann Licciardi at Cowan Leibowitz might celebrate with excess enthusiasm, but I am pretty sure St Patty's day is not one of them.
That's strange, since the Celtics wore a "BOSTON" road jersey while winning their first 8 NBA titles, and have trotted it out periodically many times since then.
I'd be more likely to see it as targeting Boston Baseball, the pretty darn decent program you could buy for $2 outside the stadium on game day, but they seem to have folded sometime during the pandemic (although because "Boston Baseball" and even "Boston Baseball Magazine" or "Boston Baseball Program" are such generic terms and Google is so crap now, I can't find any indication that they officially called it quits on-line).
It's going to be long time before the Red Sox get that trademark, if Scholz has anything to say about it.
Just off the top of my head, the broader play here may be an attempt by MLB to extract revenue from now-unlicensed trading card companies that don't use the teams' names, logos or (pretty much) colors, but do identify players as playing for Boston, Seattle, etc.
A five-minute legal analysis:
Generic terms such as "table" or whatever are not registrable as trademarks at all, and must be disclaimed (i.e., the owner does not claim exclusive right) in any registered mark containing them.
Terms that are merely descriptive aren't registrable as trademarks ("trademark" is not a verb!) unless the applicant can show that they have used the descriptive term in commerce exclusively, and for a long enough time, that consumers have come to associate the term with the applicant as an "indicator of source" rather than just to describe the goods/services. A term like BOSTON would be considered primarily geographically descriptive, but that presumption could theoretically be overcome by such a showing.
The 1953 date on the Boston application is an attempt to claim that the Red Sox have "acquired distinctiveness" (term of art) in the term BOSTON by being the exclusive user of it for baseball games, etc. since the Braves left town. As I said, in theory this could work. I'm not aware of any cases (but I haven't looked) where a term has been found to be "geographically generic" instead of "primarily geographically descriptive." Even if BOSTON isn't found to be generic and thus completely unregistrable, the exclusive use requirement would seem to be a problem, as other teams have used BOSTON for baseball (just not at the MLB level), and certainly for whatever other goods/services they tried to apply for.
I'm gonna TM oxygen. Every time someone breathes, I get a penny.
Um, that's not how trademarks work. Not even a little bit.
Both of those words have already been registered as trademarks many times, in many countries.
Surely you can't be serious.
I always assumed that was why Constantinople appears as Istanbul on maps -- they couldn't get the rights.
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