The NHL Is Having Trademark Trouble With Its Newest Team In Utah

Trademark

from the off-the-crossbar dept

Like the other major sports leagues in America, the NHL has not been immune from engaging in IP protectionism in the past. The league has been relatively touchy when it comes to local businesses simply cheering on their local hockey teams, for instance, and has also tried to keep apps that report on NHL content from using “NHL” as a keyword, claiming that is trademark infringement. On the flip side, and more recently, the NHL has also been on the receiving end of some trademark troubles. You may recall that there was that whole issue with the Las Vegas Golden Knights and the trademark opposition from the U.S. Army that was resolved in some nebulous settlement.

Well, now it’s happening again, this time for the team that the NHL relocated from Arizona to Utah. Currently called the Utah Hockey Club, the team released a poll with a bunch of potential names to the public. Three of them, including what appears to have been among the favorites, were denied by the USPTO.

According to a report from Ryan Miller of KSL in Salt Lake City, the name “Utah Yetis” was denied by the United States Patent and Trademark Office due to a “likelihood of confusion” with the Yeti cooler brand.

A non-final action on the application was issued on Jan. 9 and Utah HC has three months to issue a response with more evidence, according to Miller. He adds that the names “Utah Blizzard” and “Utah Venom” were also denied for similar reasons. Utah Hockey Club, the team’s temporary name, faces a separate challenge due to the fact that “the applied-for mark is primarily geographically descriptive of the origin of applicant’s goods and/or services,” Miller reports.

This is quite silly, don’t you think? How in the world are an NHL team and a cooler and coffee tumbler brand in any way indistinguishable? Is the concern that coolers are cold and so are hockey rinks? Or is it the licensing deal that the NHL has with Yeti to produce a handful of custom products, like drinkware? At most, assuming the team applied for the mark for merch or whatever that Yeti already has a mark on, the team could still proceed with trademarking its name for the team itself. That licensing deal can’t really be such that it precludes the NHL from naming a team. And, even if that were the case, I sure would think this fight would mark the end of that licensing deal once its term expires.

As for the Blizzard or Venom, neither of them strike me as the names of famous sports teams. The closest I can get to Blizzard is the Colorado Avalanche.

If the team name ends up being chosen simply because it wasn’t challenged, that would be too bad.

Miller reports that the names “Mammoth” and “Outlaws” did not face a challenge from the patent office. The non-final action for “Outlaws” was issued on Jan. 9 and is active for three months but the non-final action for “Mammoth” was delivered on Nov. 5, meaning only one more month remains before that application is abandoned.

Tick-tock, I guess, but the fact is that the Utah Yetis name sounds awesome and is awesome. It is also absolutely not going to somehow cause the public to think that the Yeti cooler people are now owners of an NHL franchise. And we know it won’t cause any “false association” with the NHL, since the company already has that licensing deal in place that creates a real association.

So what are we doing here?

Filed Under: coolers, hockey, likelihood of confusion, trademark, uspto, utah yetis, yetis
Companies: nhl, utah hockey club