Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we cover an interesting story that broke in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl: a fight over the trademark for "The Official Pizza of Football." We also look at another recent trademark opposition involving Blockchain and Pokémon.
Our first case comes when Genesco Sports Enterprises, a Dallas based company, filed to register a U.S. trademark for Official Pizza of Football. One might immediately assume the NFL or NCAA would oppose such a registration to maintain their licensing rights, but you'd be wrong. Instead, it's Pizza Hut that stepped up to oppose this registration.
Pizza Hut has submitted extensive evidence showing their official and exclusive pizza sponsorship deals with these sports organizations and the ESPN College Gameday show. As a result, the company claims that Genesco's registration would mislead consumers to assume deals were made that are not actually in place. The fun assertion here is that Pizza Hut is trying to prove who is the official pizza of football, a rare piece of levity in the opposition board proceedings. But Pizza Hut spends a lot of money to do those sponsorships, so it makes sense they would spend a small amount of legal fees to protect their brand position. I suspect Pizza Hut will successfully oppose this other registration based on the overlap of their slogan with this intended mark.
If nothing else, we can all agree pizza is one official food of football, across the board. But you can do so much better for Super Bowl party food, and I hope you did, considering how lame the game and halftime show turned out to be.
In our second story about recent trademark oppositions, Nintendo is back in front of the board opposing another company trying to register a brand too close to Nintendo's IP. In this case, the trademark is for Cryptokemon, from a company called S&C Digital Solutions. The intent is to use Cryptokemon to be a blockchain-based digital collectible pets game.
Sound familiar? Nintendo thinks it does, as the collectible pocket monsters games called Pokémon would attest. Thus, Nintendo is claiming that this mark is too similar to Pokémon and would confuse consumers by creating an association between the game properties and companies that will not exist. Nintendo is trying to snuff out this cute title for a blockchain-based game, and it seems like it will be a close call on whether they will succeed. The names are similar at the end, but that may not be enough to prove consumer confusion.
The Bottom Line is, whether protecting brand position bought by sponsorships and licensing, or guarding against any competitors using a similar sounding name, big companies continuously monitor those trademark applications about to register and they often oppose such applications. It can be very difficult for small companies and individuals to compete in expensive opposition procedures, and that's probably what Pizza Hut and Nintendo hope for here. We will keep you informed if any interesting developments come out of these opposition cases.
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