Oh please. . . this is old news.
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Maybe the roller derby team can use the ‘Indians’ name, which is now available?
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You’re really overestimating the intelligence of the general public. And Cleveland residents are most certainly below the general public in intelligence so….
Just have both teams play some derby (not sure what the technical term is) and the winner gets the name.
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The roller derby team never trademarked the name. A quick trademark lookup shows that the name “Cleveland Guardians” was recently acquired, and is now owned, by the Indians management. Sounds like the roller derby team is the party that goofed up here.
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So they go from stealing one group of peoples name and identity to another’s. They certainly seemed to have learnt checks notes nothing…
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If the roller derby team has been actively using the name for a while even without officially registering it, that would be grounds for disputing the new trademark registration.
The roller derby team presumably likes its name, used it first, and would prefer to keep using it. As a matter of principle, the baseball team should be told to go away and think of another, unused, name, but I suspect that is not how this is going to play out in the end.
I don’t think the URL matters. MLB teams all use a standard mlb.com/ URL, and many obvious variant URLs don’t even redirect (e.g. ladodgers.com and sandiegopadres.com don’t seem to be owned by the respective teams). It’s 2021: guessing at and typing in a URL isn’t a typical use case for the internet.
This will end the way it always does: with Big Roller Derby using its market dominance to put the screws to the little guy.
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They can always just add “of the Galaxy” to get around the copyright of the roller derby team.
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Yeah, I see the MLB team ownership wanting to settle this amicably, and perhaps even look for a way to spin it into how they support other, scrappier sports and are now all about how great Cleveland is and so on. Offer the derby team either a name buyout or letting them keep the name but with unified marketing.
Heck, I would not be surprised if they knew about the derby team long in advance and all of this has been ironed out in advance, we are just seeing a pantomime, a PR stunt.
That doesn’t sound at all shady 
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The real solution is just to merge the sports. We know from Rollerball (the excellent original, please, not the remake ~20 years ago) that futuristic sports involve skates. So why not Roller baseball?
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“No time-outs, no penalties, no substitutions.”
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make that more resources than business sense
exactly. my first thought about this story was that they haven’t cared what anybody thought about their problematic name since 1915, why would they care about what they probably see as a ladies’ social club?
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