Helicopters and news cameras ultimately drained most of the suspense out of the Washington Commanders’ name reveal last week, and the rampant online speculation over the last month didn’t help matters, either.
But Washington’s business side went to great lengths to keep the Commanders’ name a secret for as long as possible. Need an example? Look no further than the measures the team took in applying for trademarks.
The Burgundy and Gold initially filed trademark applications for the Commanders name and logo in the Caribbean country of Trinidad and Tobago all the way back in August. As the Cleveland Guardians did with their trademarks, Washington took advantage of a little-known 1883 treaty that gave the team priority on the marks when it was time to register them in the U.S. as well.
The Commanders applied for a total of seven trademarks related to the new name and logo, according to records from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The applications cover the marks to be used on anything from apparel like T-shirts and shoes to “education and entertainment services.” Two of those seven were filed months beforehand in a different country and then transferred to the U.S. on Feb. 2.
Records show the team filed the two wordmark applications — for “Commanders” and “Washington Commanders” — in the island country on Aug. 6. For context, that was just a week after team President Jason Wright told reporters the franchise had narrowed down the name to three finalists.
Washington was able to use a foreign country to hide its trademarks thanks to the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property.
The international trade treaty, first signed in 1883, says that anyone can file a trademark application in any of the 178 participating countries and then transfer that application to another country within six months while still holding priority.
Unlike the U.S., Trinidad and Tobago does not have a trademark portal that can be searched online — providing the cover that allowed the team to keep the name under wraps for months while the executives took care of other business.
MLB’s Cleveland Guardians, formerly the Indians, took a similar approach during the franchise’s name change in August, using the East African country of Mauritius, another place without an online portal, to stash away its application.
“Any ‘squatter’ that was trying to file trademark applications in the United States (over the past 6 months) would now be in line BEHIND the @Commanders at the United States Patent and Trademark Office,” lawyer and trademark expert Josh Gerben tweeted Monday.
Commanders coach Ron Rivera said last week that the team was concerned the name would get out beforehand. Wright told The Washington Times that the franchise realized that the more people they looped into the process, the bigger chance that the Commanders moniker would leak prior to the team’s official announcement. That was a risk the Commanders were willing to take, Wright said.
Still, Washington was concerned about trademarks. The Commanders did not want to get into a legal battle over their name, as the Guardians did with a local roller derby team also named the Cleveland Guardians. The MLB Guardians were hit with a lawsuit after the reveal and eventually settled, but it was a saga that Washington wants to avoid entirely.
In doing so, the Commanders ruled out other possible candidates like “Red Wolves” and “Wolves” over legal concerns.
Elsewhere, Wright tried to limit those in the know when the rebrand first got underway. He said only a few dozen knew at first, though that number eventually expanded to hundreds once the project got closer to completion.
“As we got to the end, Commanders just felt right,” Wright said.
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