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Last week, USL filed what seems to me to be an important trademark infringement complaint against UPSL. It's worth taking a few moments to understand its significance in the overall scheme of the US Soccer landscape
On one level, it's similar to the US Soccer Foundation's lawsuit against USSF in that USL is arguing that UPSL's marks are sufficiently similar that they have a tendency to confuse consumers and sponsors and therefore constitute trademark infringement under the Lanham Act
The similarity of the names is part of the source of the alleged confusion: UPSL is only one letter different than USL, which impacts web address for instance. More importantly, UPSL and USL now both have the same Championship and League 1/One names for their lower levels
Another source of alleged confusion is that UPSL Pro is very similar to USL Pro, which is a trademark still owned, although not currently used, by USL
Finally, USL argues that the word "Premier" in UPSL implies that it is of higher quality, so this isn't merely an allegation that UPSL is trying to capitalize upon USL's goodwill, but an allegation that UPSL is attempting to confuse consumers/sponsors about which is "better"
It strikes me that this last allegation takes a page from the latest battles over the naming of US youth soccer clubs. There has been a proliferation of teams with names like premier, elite, academy, pre-DA, pre-ECNL, etc
On another level, this seems to be less a trademark dispute and more the use of trademark to police the line between professional and other leagues. As USL points out, it is sanctioned as D2 by USSF, while UPSL isn't sanctioned by USSF at all (it's sanctioned by US Adult Soccer)
USL's characterization of UPSL as trying to "push its way into professional men's soccer at the national level" seems to be the crux of the dispute
This is especially true since UPSL was founded in 2011, but USL states that its concern began in 2017 when UPSL expanded and changed its focus to include teams calling themselves "professional"
In other words, this lawsuit seems like an attempt to police a borderline between professional and adult competitive (but non-professional) leagues that has increasingly become blurred as leagues like UPSL and NPSL have expanded
That's partly why you see USL making claims about UPSL's inferior quality. In the absence of USSF divisional sanctioning (which these adult teams have avoided by going through USASA), USL's brand becomes more important in differentiating itself
In that sense, USL's lawsuit against UPSL is a self-help remedy against what USL likely considers ineffectual USSF sanctioning authority over such leagues. It is, ironically, the flip side of the NASL lawsuit, which argues that USSF sanctioning is too strong
BTW, for those wondering why USL's lawsuit was filed in the Central District of CA, 30% of all trademark cases are filed in LA, the most of any federal court in the nation. With the entertainment industry here, judges/lawyers are experienced and precedent tends to be favorable
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