A’s denied trademark on “Vegas Athletics” name, everybody LOL

LOLAthletics social media has been lit up for the last 24 hours with the news  — actually first reported on Friday on an intellectual property blog, but hardly anyone noticed for a few days — that the United States Patent and Trademark Office denied A’s ownership a trademark on the names “Las Vegas Athletics” and “Vegas Athletics,” the presumed preferred names for the team once it presumably moves to its presumed new stadium in 2028, presumably. The reason given by the USPTO: “athletics” is a generic term, and while the MLB franchise has used it in four different cities now over the course of more than a century, attaching “Las Vegas” to it doesn’t make it a trademarkable term:

The name ‘Las Vegas Athletics’ describes a professional “athletics” organization located in Las Vegas. And, the team has not yet begun widespread commercial use of that name for many of the goods and services listed in its applications. Without that use, there is limited evidence the USPTO can rely on to find that the mark has acquired distinctiveness in the marketplace…

The real problem here is procedural timing. Because the team has not yet started operating as the Las Vegas Athletics, it cannot easily produce the kind of marketplace evidence, such as sales figures, advertising spend, media recognition, and consumer perception, that would normally overcome a descriptiveness refusal.

This adds one more element of hilarity to the A’s dumpster fire of a relocation process, but it doesn’t seem likely to be a major roadblock to the A’s moving to Vegas. IP lawyer Josh Gerben writes on his blog that he expects the franchise to eventually get its trademarks once it has real-life Vegas fans it can point to. And until then, the worst John Fisher will have to deal with is not being able to rein in bootleg “Vegas Athletics” t-shirt sellers, which is significantly smaller fry than paying for a $2 billion stadium; for that matter, there’s nothing stopping third parties from making their own “Athletics” shirts and selling them in Sacramento right now, if they thought anyone would buy them, but that hasn’t stopped the A’s from thriving (LOL) there.

Another option would be to change the A’s name once the team moves — when the former Arizona Coyotes absconded to Utah and couldn’t get a trademark on their preferred name (the Utah Yeti, LOL), they pivoted to Mammoth instead, though that’s also not going great, trademark-wise. There have been dumber complications to sports team relocations, and the A’s have already hit most of those, so may as well go for the full set!