Sad Raiders Fan Tries To Keep Team In Oakland By Squatting On Trademark

I'm not certain why people think this will work, but there seems to be an idea floating around a few of our fellow citizens that they can simply force their favorite sports teams to do what they want by filing trademarks for things they never intend to use. You may recall the story about a jackass in North Dakota who wanted to prevent the University of North Dakota from changing its name from The Fighting Sioux to, well, anything else that had been suggested by filing for trademarks on all the other things that had been suggested. Such a strategy was doomed to fail from the beginning for any number of reasons, but mostly because you actually have to be using what you're trying to trademark in commerce in order to get it approved, and trolling isn't a commercial enterprise as far as I know. Now we have another story, though it shifts from one of trolling to one of simple sadness, as a Raiders fan who doesn't want his team to move to San Antonio, as reportedly might soon happen, has decided to launch a preemptive strike by filing for a trademark for "San Antonio Raiders."

An Oakland Raiders season-ticket holder who wants the team to remain in the East Bay has filed a trademark application for the name “San Antonio Raiders.” “I figured if I took over the name, San Antonio Raiders, I could force (the team) to stay in Oakland,” Lane Blue of Fresno, California, said in a phone interview.

I'm loathe to heap any real anger upon a Raiders fan, because it seems to me that life as a Raiders fan must be so horrible so as to warp the brain to some degree, but anyone with a bare minimum of knowledge of how trademarks work knows this isn't going to work. Again, you have to use the mark in commerce to get a trademark at all, and Lane Blue would have to show that he's using the mark in a way with which the Raiders would be competing. Also, if the team really is planning on a move to San Antonio, it would be criminal for the team's lawyers not to have already begun the trademark filing process. Regardless, you can expect the application to be reviewed and summarily denied. But the larger point is that this is a symptom of what permission culture does: it makes the uninformed think that tools like trademark allow for a sort of monopolistic control where it actually doesn't. Why does it do this? Well, because too many times trademark, and other intellectual property laws, skirt or outright cross the line into that exact sort of heavy-handed protectionism, albeit in a less obvious way. So sorry, Raiders fan. You can't use intellectual property to force your team to stay nearby. Now, maybe if your last name was Disney, on the other hand...

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