The Washington Post has a piece today on the ongoing legal saga between Pro-Football, Inc. and a group of Native Americans over the Washington Redskins name (see prior blog posts on this subject here, here, and here). Following a June ruling by the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board cancelling all six of the team’s REDSKINS trademark registrations on the basis that the term is disparaging to Native Americans, Pro-Football filed a federal lawsuit against the Native American group that brought the cancellation proceeding against the six trademarks. The Native American defendants have now filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that Pro-Football’s dispute is with the U.S. Trademark Office, rather than with the defendants, and that a proper remedy would be to simply appeal the TTAB’s ruling. The defendants also speculate that Pro-Football may have elected to sue them instead of appealing the TTAB ruling in order to avoid the risk of a final judgment from the court in favor of cancellation. Read the full article here, and the Memorandum of Law in Support of Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss here.

By flickr user dbking [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Reposted from The Washington Post.