The Washington Redskins recently filed its appeal of
the Patent and Trademark Office decision to cancel the team’s six federal
trademarks, with the team’s attorney calling the ruling a “flawed decision.”
“We believe that the Trademark Trial and Appeal
Board ignored both federal case law and the weight of the evidence, and we look
forward to having a federal court review this obviously flawed decision,” Bob
Raskopf, the team’s trademark attorney, said in a statement.
The was filed in the federal court for the Eastern
District of Virginia and pushes back against the 2-1 decision by the Patent
Office’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, which stated the Redskins name is
“disparaging to Native Americans at the respective times they were registered.”
The complaint said the board’s decision was “replete
with errors of fact and law” and said its evidence was insufficient.
In its statement Thursday, the team said its
complaint asked the court to consider “the serious Constitutional issues that
the Board lacked the authority to address” adding that the NFL team was
“improperly penalized.” The judge assigned to the appeal is U.S. District Judge
Gerald Bruce Lee.
“Specifically, by cancelling valuable, decades-old
registrations, the Board improperly penalized the Washington Redskins based on
the content of the team’s speech in violation of the First Amendment,” the
statement said, which added the team “has been unfairly deprived of its
valuable and long-held intellectual property rights in violation of the Fifth
Amendment.”
The lead plaintiff the the Patent Office case
responded to the team’s appeal, saying the Redskins efforts are “doomed.”
“This effort is doomed to fail, but if they want to
prolong this litigation which has already gone on for 22 years, I guess they
have that prerogative,” Amanda Blackhorse said in a statement released
Thursday. Read more:
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