UFC Opposes Trademark App For Pillow Fighting Championship League Over Logo
The Ultimate Fighting Championship people are certainly no strangers to readers here at Techdirt. The league that puts on both mixed martial arts events and, incredibly, events where participants take turns slapping the shit out of each other has been one of the most aggressive pushers of greater and greater IP enforcement programs in professional sports. From the desire for instant takedown enforcement foisted on ISPs to pushing for reforming the DMCA to notice and stay down" practices, the UFC makes no apologies for wanting as much control and enforcement of its IP as possible.
So it probably shouldn't be a huge surprise that the company also is quite draconian on matters of trademark enforcement as well. Still, the UFC's opposition to another event league's trademark application strikes me as a bit silly, given that the application was for the Pillow Fight Championship organization.
Soon after their professional pillow fights went viral, the world's biggestMMApromotion sent out their lawyers to complain about Pillow FC's logo and trademark application.
As the on-going case with the Patent and Trademark Office shows, the Ultimate Fighting Championship has formally objected to Pillow FC's trademark application, citing that it could cause confusion" to have that kind of branding.
TheNY Postwas first to report on the news, with Pillow Fight Championship CEO Steve Williams telling the outlet that the UFC was being ridiculous" with their claims.
Okay, so let's stipulate a couple of things here. First, the opposition from the UFC almost certainly comes from the fact that the branding for PFC, specifically the acronym, is styled and color schemed in a way that looks like the UFC's branding. It's also the case that the acronym is literally one letter off from UFC's. If that's as far as you dug into this, the opposition doesn't seem all that crazy.
But here's the branding side by side.
It's suddenly a lot less cut and dry. The fonts are similar, but different. There's no angle on the lettering in the PFC's logo. Finally, the PFC branding typically has the full name of the league in big, bold letters. Unless UFC wants to argue that the public might be confused into thinking the company got into pillow fighting, there's enough distinction that confusion over the logos themselves is probably not a reasonable fear.
But rather than fight this, PFC changed its logo... slightly.
Will that be enough to satsify the UFC? I somehow doubt it, but I certainly think it should. That logo in sum total certainly doesn't call to mind the UFC to me. Whether the notoriously aggressive UFC agrees remains to be seen.