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U.S. patent office cancels Redskins trademark registration, says name is disparaging

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/us-patent-office-cancels-redskins-trademark-registration-says-name-is-disparaging/2014/06/18/e7737bb8-f6ee-11e3-8aa9-dad2ec039789_story.html

 

U.S. patent office cancels Redskins trademark registration, says name is disparaging
 
BY THERESA VARGAS June 18 at 9:56 AM  
The United States Patent and Trademark Office has canceled the Washington Redskins trademark registration, calling the football team’s name “disparaging to Native Americans.”
 
The landmark case, which appeared before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, was filed on behalf of five Native Americans. It was the second time such a case was filed.
 
“This victory was a long time coming and reflects the hard work of many attorneys at our firm,” said lead attorney Jesse Witten, of Drinker Biddle & Reath.
 
Federal trademark law does not permit registration of trademarks that “may disparage” individuals or groups or “bring them into contempt or disrepute.” The ruling pertains to six different trademarks associated with the team, each containing the word “Redskin.”
 
“We are extraordinarily gratified to have prevailed in this case,” Alfred Putnam Jr., the chairman of Drinker Biddle & Reath, said. “The dedication and professionalism of our attorneys and the determination of our clients have resulted in a milestone victory that will serve as an historic precedent.”

 

 

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As much of a fan of the team as I was growing up in the DC area as a kid in the 1980's, I think the time has come for a change. At least it's a more reasonable change offering than "we can't call our Washington basketball team the Bullets anymore because of gang violence...let's call them the Wizards!"

 

And, since this is going to cause Dan Snyder to have an aneurysm, it can't be all bad.

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While I agree that the name should probably be changed, I have a big problem with a trademark being cancelled because some people find it offensive.  It doesn't take much imagination to see where this leads. What "may disparage individuals or groups or bring them into contempt or disrepute" seems extremely vague.

 

While I have little sympathy for Snyder, I'm not sure this is the best way to change his mind. Again, not because the name isn't offensive, but because this strikes me as an abuse of power.

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While I agree that the name should probably be changed, I have a big problem with a trademark being cancelled because some people find it offensive.  It doesn't take much imagination to see where this leads. What "may disparage individuals or groups or bring them into contempt or disrepute" seems extremely vague.

 

While I have little sympathy for Snyder, I'm not sure this is the best way to change his mind. Again, not because the name isn't offensive, but because this strikes me as an abuse of power.

 

 

I agree. They should change it, but the patent office shouldn't force them to. Slippery slope and abuse of power. I don't think the name was ever intended to be offensive, but it is to a lot of people, even me. My Native American bloodlines are pretty watered down, but they are still there. My Dad could have easily passed for full blooded Cherokee. They could find a name that does honor them without even changing the logo, just the name.

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I agree. They should change it, but the patent office shouldn't force them to. Slippery slope and abuse of power. I don't think the name was ever intended to be offensive, but it is to a lot of people, even me. My Native American bloodlines are pretty watered down, but they are still there. My Dad could have easily passed for full blooded Cherokee. They could find a name that does honor them without even changing the logo, just the name.

 

FWIW no one is forcing them to change anything. All this is going to do is force them to use the (™) instead of (®) that they are currently using.  Because it has been in use for so long and is widely associated with the team, their trademark will still be respected in the courts when it comes to piracy since the (™) protects against counterfeit material.  It has no affect on the logo, and in fact the only real affect is licensing with vendors like apparrel companies which is going to cost the Redskins some money. 

 

This boils down to a government agency simply enforcing the rules that are already on their books, and have been for some time,  Which is that it is illegal to register a trademark with a racial slur. What this is not, is government over reach or tyrranny or any other of the zany things I have heard on talk radio lately.

 

Not that you are implying that.. It's just there has been a lot of over-reaction to this issue. Basically the patent office is playing it safe and following the letter of the law while they let the courts handle it.  There is a stay on the patent office's decision so nothing has even actually happened yet.  The Redskins still control the (®) until the courts rule on it, which is likely to take a year or more.

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I was blown away by this article from Rick Reilly. 

 

To me it always seemed really offensive...but if HS teams that are comprised mainly of native americans are using it, then maybe it's not. 

 

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/9689220/redskins-name-change-not-easy-sounds

 

What do you think the reaction would be if you walked up to a native american and called him that?

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http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/06/a-linguist-on-why-redskin-is-racist-patent-overturned/373198/

 

 
When Slang Becomes a Slur
GEOFFREY NUNBERGJUN 23 2014, 7:08 AM ET
 
The linguist who testified against the Redskins in their trademark proceedings explains why the team's name can't be separated from historical hatreds.
 
The thing to bear in mind about the Redskins trademark case is that it was basically about the ‘60s—and the ‘60s of Mad Men, not Woodstock.
 
Whatever the connotations of “redskin” now, the question facing the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board was whether it was disparaging when the team first registered it as a trademark in 1967. If that was so, the registration would have fallen afoul of the provision of the Lanham Act that disallows the registration of trademarks that may disparage the members of a group. You have the right to pick a slur for your product name, the thinking goes, but you can’t expect the government to protect your exclusive use of it by restricting the speech of others.
 
That was the argument of the petitioners who first asked the US Trademark Office to cancel the mark in 1995, initiating a legal process that would wind up 19 years and two trials later in last week’s decision that the mark should be canceled, which is where things stand pending appeal. But the historical perspective made things more difficult for the petitioners, and for me, as their linguistics expert. How do you determine what the connotations of a word were back in the ‘60s?
 
That may not have been so terribly long ago, but the racial attitudes of that era can strike us as primordial. What should we make of the fact that before the mark’s registration, no dictionaries labeled “redskin” as offensive, the way they did slurs for blacks and Jews? In fact it was only in 1967 that the Random House Dictionary became the first to provide such a label, and more than a decade went by before any others followed suit.
 
The team’s attorneys and linguistics experts argued that this demonstrated that the term had never really been disparaging—just a “robust informal synonym” for “American Indian,” which dictionaries only started to label as offensive in response to political pressure from a few Indian activists. But lexicographers are creatures of their age, and before the ‘60s members of the dominant culture were selective in their sensitivities. Merriam-Webster’s monumental Third International, published in 1961, warned its readers off “nigger,” “chink,” and “kike,” but it didn’t feel the need to indicate that some people might also take offense at “white trash,” “gook,” “wetback,” “pansy” and “fag.” Not that those words hadn’t been derogatory or demeaning all along. It’s just that lexicographers and most everyone else weren’t capable of imagining how those words would land on the people they targeted.
 
“Redskin,” too, has been derogatory for a long time. It was recently discovered that the word actually began its life in English 200 years ago as a translation of an Indian term, via French—it didn’t have anything to do with those stories about bounties for bloody Indian scalps. But then “nigger” had a benign origin, as well. Since the mid-19th century “redskin” has simply been the slang word the white man used for the Indian, and like all slang words, it was infused with the attitudes about the thing it names. In the passages from books and newspapers and the movie clips we provided the court to document the word’s history, the word is inevitably associated with contempt, derision, condescension, or sentimental paeans to the noble savage. It couldn’t have been otherwise—what other attitudes were out there?
 
That all started to change in the ‘60s, though it took dictionaries a while to catch up. The sea change in social attitudes that led to the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965 also transformed the way we talked about race and ethnicity. That was when we collectively acknowledged that every group was entitled to control its own linguistic destiny, and decide what it should and shouldn’t be called—that groups had the right to define themselves.
 
“Redskin” has simply been the slang word the white man used for the Indian. Like all slang words, it was infused with the attitudes about the thing it names.
The principle had far-reaching consequences. When the decade opened, liberal-minded people referred to Negroes (or to “the Negro,” as LBJ liked to say), while an unreconstructed rear guard still talked about “coloreds.” By the decade’s end, pretty much everybody was using “blacks.” Over the following decades Orientals became Asians, queers became gays, and the new terms “Latino,” “Hispanic,” and “Chicano” were added to the vocabulary. And the old word “slur” acquired a new meaning to refer to a word that conveyed an ethnic or racial insult, one whose use was not just unkind, but as a social thought crime. Not even the vocal reactions against “political correctness” in later decades called the right of self-naming into serious question. Those on the cultural right may ridicule PC ideas about race and gender, but in their public discussions they’re as fastidious as anybody else about avoiding words that are regarded as offensive or simply outmoded.
 
There are exceptions to that pattern, but “redskin” isn’t among them. By the 1970s, the word was widely considered as a slur. All modern dictionaries label it as offensive or disparaging, just at they do the N-word—no journalist would begin a story, “Redskin astronaut John Herrington was honored last night…” Not all Indians object to the word, it’s true. In surveys, it’s offensive to 35 to 45 percent of Indians enrolled in tribes, but far fewer among the much larger—and rapidly growing—population who self-identify as Indians, many out of a spiritual affinity or a family legend about a Cherokee princess four generations back. Whatever the exact number, it offends enough people to put it off limits as a form of address. Any white person who uses the word injudiciously to a group of Indians can count on receiving a sufficient quota of angry stares.
 
Even the defenders of the team’s name don’t deny that it’s a personal slur.  When NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was asked whether he’d address a Native American as a redskin to his face, he sidestepped the question, replying, “This is the name of a football team.” So did the team’s trademark attorney Bob Raskopf—“That’s not what this case is about. It’s what our word means. You need to put the word in context.”
 
But when it comes to slurs, “context” isn’t a decontaminant. You assume Raskopf wouldn’t have offered that argument on behalf of a team called the Washington Spearchuckers, however storied its history. But the team argues that their use of “redskin” is really is a separate item that’s free of the stigma that attaches to the word in other settings—it’s “our word,” as Raskopf says—which they’ve always meant purely as an honorific. As the team’s president Bruce Allen puts it, their use of the name “has always been respectful of and shown reverence toward the proud legacy and traditions of Native Americans.”
 
If it’s a slur when you say it to an American Indian’s face, it’s a slur when you sing it with 80 thousand other fans. 
That line of defense oscillates between the disingenuous and the obtuse. Start with the “tribute” business. Team names can be genuine tributes when they refer to a constituency the team can claim to represent—you think of the Steelers or the Ragin’ Cajuns. But names like Redskin aren’t honoring anybody or anything. They’re meant to evoke people and things known for their savagery or inhumanity—wild beasts, destructive forces of nature, brigands and bandits, ancient warriors, and other assorted malignant beings. The New Jersey NHL team didn’t call themselves the Devils in order to do honor to the Prince of Darkness.
 
In modern times, of course, the point of those names isn’t to actually terrify opponents so much as to create spectacle and to sell gear with cool logos. As the historian J. Gordon Hylton recounts, the Redskins’ founder George Preston Marshall deserves a lot of the credit for inventing modern mascot pageantry. Marshall was an unapologetic racist of the old school—he was the last NFL owner to integrate his team, and then only under threat of losing his stadium—and it isn’t surprising that he made the name the occasion for a kind of minstrelsy in redface, complete with marching bands in headdresses, cheerleaders in Indian costumes, and a halftime show featuring a leggy Indian maiden dancing with someone dressed as a horse. Marshall even had his players take the field wearing war paint while the coach stood on the sidelines in a Sioux headdress.
 
Some of the more buffoonish features of those spectacles were retired over the coming decades; by the 1980s, the lyrics of the team’s fight song, written by Marshall himself, no longer contained the line “Scalp ‘um, swamp ‘um, we will take’um big score….” But the plot hasn’t changed: The song still begins with an apostrophe to “braves on the warpath.”
 
“We cannot ignore our 81-year history,” the team’s owner Dan Snyder insists, and neither should anyone else. It takes a certain audacity to be able to say with a straight face that those spectacles showed “reverence toward the proud legacy and traditions of Native Americans.” Actually, they don’t have anything to do with “Native Americans” at all. The whole reason for introducing that term in the 1960s was to find a supplement for “American Indian” that described the indigenous peoples as they actually were and had been, without invidious stereotypes. But “redskin” conjures up a purely mythical race, as fabulous and as defunct as the Spartans, the buccaneers, and the Vikings. Marshall’s redskins were burlesques of the war bonnet savages of the movies, which were the only Indians the fans of those Eastern city teams were apt to have seen
 
Not much has changed since then in the way Indian mascots are regarded. Modern cinematic representations of Indians may be more thoughtful and nuanced than they once were, but sports fans don't show any sign of adjusting their stereotypes accordingly. You think of the Atlanta Braves’ fans tomahawk chop and the war chant drawn from the motif that announced the arrival of redskins in every Hollywood Western. This isn’t just about movie Indians, but old movie Indians.
 
To a greater or lesser degree, the casual denigration of Native Americans sullies all the professional sports teams with Indian mascots, including the Braves, the Kansas City Chiefs, and the Cleveland Indians. But only the Washington team incorporates that denigration in its very name. When you a pronounce a slur, you affiliate yourself with the attitudes and actions of all the people who have used it before you, whatever your personal feelings about the group it refers to. There’s no exemption for good intentions, or even for ignorance. “Nigger” stings even in the mouth of a child who doesn’t know it’s offensive.
 
“Redskin” conjures up a purely mythical race, as fabulous and as defunct as the Spartans, the buccaneers and the Vikings. 
The historical overtones of “redskin” may be faint to most Americans, but they’re still audible whenever it’s said. Indians themselves sometimes use the word in team names as a reclaimed epithet, but that dispensation doesn’t extend to whites, no more than the appearance of the N-word in hip hop lyrics gives whites permission to use it it. If it’s a slur when you say it to an American Indian’s face, it’s a slur when you sing it with 80 thousand other fans.  Of all the things that defenders of the name have said, there’s nothing to touch the effrontery of Raskopf’s assertion “This is our word”—as if the team had the power to pluck the word out of history, both theirs and its own, and oblige everyone, Indians included, to honor their meaning of the word.
 
I understand why fans get irritated when someone suggests that there’s anything racist in Indian team names and the spectacle and behavior that they give rise to. The tomahawk chop, the war bonnets and war drums, the chants—it’s just people having fun, in the great American tradition of playing Indian. Since the time of the Boston Tea Party, after all, “acting like a wild Indian” has been the characteristic expression of the unbridled American id.
 
But everything changes when you come to realize that Redskins is genuinely offensive to some. A lot of fans react by getting defensive, decrying the whining oversensitivity of the complainers, railing about PC and the thought police. At that point, though, the game is already up. Once that testy or belligerent note creeps into the chants and songs, they can’t be innocent fun anymore. Best give it up, so the conversation can return to football.
 

 

 

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What do you think the reaction would be if you walked up to a native american and called him that?


I was completely on the side of this is a ridiculous name and it has to go. But if it was so bad you wouldnt see teams of native americans naming themselves it. There are layers to this I never thought about.
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I don't know, I still think there's a whole lot of political grandstanding going on. 

 

Which one of these things is highly offensive and must be changed:

 

 

im5xz2q9bjbg44xep08bf5czq.gif

 

 

 

 

741.gif

 

 

 

 

 

edited to add that "both" is a perfectly acceptable answer

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I don't know, I still think there's a whole lot of political grandstanding going on. 

 

Which one of these things is highly offensive and must be changed:

 

 

im5xz2q9bjbg44xep08bf5czq.gif

 

 

 

 

741.gif

 

 

 

 

 

edited to add that "both" is a perfectly acceptable answer

 

Again, the logo is completely unnafected by this decsion.  So if we are comparing apples to apples, Indian is not a slur, whereas Redskin is defined as such by every english dictionary you can name.

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Again, the logo is completely unnafected by this decsion.  So if we are comparing apples to apples, Indian is not a slur, whereas Redskin is defined as such by every english dictionary you can name.



This is true. Although if they were the Cleveland Redskins I'm not so sure the trademark thing happens to begin with. It seems an underhanded way of dealing with something that shouldn't have gotten this far but the fault is really with Snyder and the NFL for not cleaning this up on their own.

Goodell is a stooge & our government is largely theater. Glad the name is under fire but not as enthusiastic about how that's being accomplished.
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