March Madness—aka the NCAA men’s basketball tournament—is getting closer to the finale. But while you’re watching to see who will be crowned champion this weekend, please take a moment to consider another source of entertainment: the funny or just plain strange moments that regularly crop up in our system of justice. I know that if we had a bracket for oddball legal stories, I would have definitely penciled in “Lawyer Says He’s ‘Not a Cat’ During Zoom Hearing” for the Final Four, along with “Lawyer’s Pants Burst Into Flame During Closing Argument.” Of course, we’ve had some interesting contenders lately, and maybe there’s a Cinderella among them.
Let’s begin with a strange tale courtesy of the NCAA’s own lawyers. Recently, the NCAA, which holds the trademarks for “March Madness,” “Final Four,” and even the phrase, “March Mayhem,” filed a petition with the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board to cancel a trademark registration made by the Virginia Urology Center. The trademark in question? “Vasectomy Mayhem.” It seems the NCAA, which has owned the “March Mayhem” trademark since July 2013, somehow thinks that “Vasectomy Mayhem” is confusingly similar to the NCAA’s other marks. Furthermore, the NCAA’s lawyers argue that use of the trademark “Vasectomy Mayhem” is “likely to result in confusion, mistake, or deception,” and the goods or services offered by Virginia Urology Center are likely to be mistakenly believed by consumers to be “legitimately connected with, or sponsored, licensed, or approved by” the NCAA. Wow, I don’t want to sound snippy about this but I find the NCAA’s argument hard to believe. Maybe I’m just put off by the cockiness of its lawyers, but I find its legal theory limp. There’s a vast difference between this and a successful “likelihood of confusion” trademark claim. I think the NCAA is just shooting blanks here.
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