USPTO Denies MLB’s Insane Attempt To Trademark ‘Play Ball’

There is no shortage of examples of Major League Baseball attempting to wield overly broad trademarks its obtained to bully others, nor examples of MLB attempting to stretch its trademark rights much further than they go. MLB opposed a trademark for a Brooklyn burger joint on behalf of the Dodgers, a team that hadn't played in Brooklyn for over five decades at that point. The league, at one point, tried to bully a local Little League for using the names of MLB teams, but not their logos, which is something that roughly every Little League team everywhere does. It attempted to trademark the names of three cities in which MLB teams play. And, my personal favorite and most appropriate for this post, the league opposed a finance company's trademark application because it claimed two of its separate teams both owned the rights to the letter W".

The real lesson in all of this is that the League can't be trusted with anything other than very narrow trademarks. Anything more broad than that causes them to act the fool. And perhaps this is a lesson the USPTO has actually learned, given that it recently denied MLB's attempt to trademark the phrase Play Ball".

The United States Patent and Trademark Office denied MLB's application to trademark Play Ball" for clothing, the USPTO wrote in a final action filing on Friday.

In this case, the applied-for mark is a commonplace term, message, or expression widely used by a variety of sources that merely conveys an ordinary, familiar, well-recognized concept or sentiment," the USPTO wrote in its denial.

The USPTO also wrote phrases that merely convey an informational message are not registerable."

Those are things that MLB's well-dressed lawyers absolutely know, of course. But they attempted to bank on a complacent trademark office to try to sneak one past the goalie anyway, to mix metaphors. And if the league had gotten the mark, you can be one hundred percent certain it would have gone on yet another bullying campaign targeting apparel makers, other sports leagues, and who knows who else.

In fact, the most surprising part of all of this is that it appears to have taken 4 years for the USPTO to reach this decision. Josh Gerben breaks it all down like this.

Gerben said the rejection and public domain nature of phrases could depend on the class. Other companies have trademarked Play Ball," including a food company for bubble gum, a minerals company for surfacing playgrounds and The Play Ball" for the gala fundraiser for the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.

In this case they are saying that the phrase has become so ubiquitous and it has this underlying meaning," Gerben said. For a clothing brand, the government doesn't think it's unique enough to be registered."

Somehow, some way, we have to get past this practice of looking at trademarks as some kind of retroactive profit center, where a business gobbles them up and then corners a market that was already in existence. That's all that this sort of attempt to lock up language is. The term play ball" can be associated with Major League Baseball, certainly. It can also be associated with other sporting activities, or business negotiations, or any other number of things. That's because it has become a generic phrase, no longer an identifier of the source of a good or service.

Again, MLB's lawyers knew all of this before applying for the mark. They just didn't care.