Publisher's Notebook

Frederick Bouchat has been fighting the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens for a long time.

The team moved from Cleveland to Charm City in 1996; for the first three seasons in Baltimore, the logo on the team helmets was a “Flying B” – A letter B on a shield with a couple of raven wings on the side.

Bouchat, a security guard and an amateur artist, drew a “Flying B” logo and faxed it to the team in 1995. He asked for an autographed helmet and a letter of acknowledgement. He got neither when the team debuted the helmets in 1996.

He sued the team and the NFL a year later, and in 1997, a Maryland federal judge ruled the team had infringed on his design. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined the appeal.

When Bouchat went to a jury in 2002 for damages, they awarded him nothing. Not even an autographed helmet.

Fast forward a couple of years. Bouchat, still steamed at designing a pro team logo with nothing to show for it, files another suit in Baltimore federal court against the Ravens and the league. The Flying B logo shows up in old NFL Films from 1996-98. U.S. District Judge Marvin Garbis tossed the suit, but the 4th Circuit reinstated parts of it.

Now, Bouchat wants to add another defendant – Electronic Arts Inc., the maker of the wildly popular Madden football video games.

The Daily Record, our sister paper in Baltimore, reports that Madden 2011 apparently has a “retro” feature programmed into it, allowing players to use an old logo or uniform for the various teams.

And yes, Bouchat’s lawyer said, the “Flying B” belonging to his client shows up in the game.

No word from the judge when he will rule on adding EA to the suit. Bouchat may recognize the judge — Garbis is the same guy who threw out his suit in 2008, before the 4th Circuit reinstated portions of it.

Note: The images below, from the Maryland Intellectual Property Law Blog, depict Bouchat’s original 1995 drawing and the Ravens’ initial helmet logo.

Anyone who has ever gotten a defendant’s name wrong and had to figure out how to fix the pleadings will appreciate this item.

There is a whole body of law relating to making a mistake on someone’s name or suing the wrong person or company.

You can move to fix a name that is incorrect. If you sue the wrong party, you better realize it before the statute of limitations runs. Or have your carrier on speed-dial.

Sports Illustrated’s Peter King has a story from the recently completed National Football League draft. The Cleveland Browns were the culprits, and a motion to correct misnomer wouldn’t help.

In the fourth round of the draft, the Browns took a tight end from USC who has one of those names that is a law firm – Jordan Cameron. They call him. Everyone’s excited. High fives all around.

Later they call him back to get some biographical information, only they call…Cameron Jordan.

Jordan is a defensive end who played at Cal. Imagine his surprise to hear from Cleveland. He had been drafted by the New Orleans Saints in the first round. Jordan told them to call Cameron.

Given the way the Browns have played the past few seasons, this makes perfect sense.

A guy in suburban Chicago was fired from his job yesterday…for wearing a Green Bay Packers tie to work.

The Chicago Tribune reports that John Stone (right), a car salesman in Oak Lawn, Ill., showed up to work Monday wearing a Packers tie, a nod to Green Bay’s trip to the Super Bowl and, he said, a way to honor his recently deceased grandmother, a big Packers fan.

His boss wasn’t amused and told him to take it off or he was fired. Stone thought he was joking. An hour later, the boss caught him still wearing the tie, and dismissed him on the spot.

Apparently, the Chevrolet dealership had done some promotions for the Chicago Bears, whom the Packers beat for the trip to play the Pittsburgh Steelers. The boss didn’t like the apparent mixed message. And he said he didn’t know there was any emotional connection for Stone.

Stone disobeyed a direct order from his boss, but how’s that going to play out on his future job apps? Stone will come out looking better.

Q. “Please state reason for leaving last position.”

A. “Fired for wearing Green Bay Packers tie to work.”

Perhaps he should look for work across the border in Wisconsin. There, going down for a Packers tie would be viewed a badge of honor.

Update: There is a happy ending to this story. After word of Stone’s sacking got out, USA Today reported that a rival Chevrolet dealer in Homewood, another Chicago suburb, offered Stone a job, saying “good salesmen are hard to find” and that it was “idiotic” to terminate someone for just wearing a tie you don’t like. The fact that the hiring could generate good-guy publicity points for the Homewood dealership probably didn’t even enter his mind. No, not at all.

(AP photo/Chicago Sun-Times, Jean Lachat)

If you’re a fan of pro football, you’ve no doubt heard of the National Football League’s crackdown on helmet-to-helmet hits this year, with fines levied by the commissioner.

James Harrison of the Pittsburgh Steelers has become the poster child for helmet offenses. Just yesterday he got slammed with another fine, one for $25K, for a helmet-led hit on Buffalo Bills QB Ryan Fitzpatrick on Sunday. Harrison has been fined four times for a total of $125,000 this season.

Inevitably the helmet-to-helmet issue has made it to court, but in a roundabout way. Up in Maryland, a former player for the Carolina Panthers and Washington Redskins is seeking a bigger benefit payment from the NFL’s pension plan. Eric Shelton played three seasons with the Panthers, then signed with the ‘Skins in 2008 as a free agent. He was a Redskin for six days — he took a helmet-to-helmet hit during training camp and his career was over.

The Daily Record, our sister paper in Baltimore, has the full story.

Dexter Manley, the one-time star defensive end for the Washington Redskins, won two Super Bowl rings with the team in the 1980s.

The ring Manley got for the ‘Skins’ beat-down of the Miami Dolphins in 1983 ended up in a Houston pawn shop in 1998; he used the $5,000 he got for it to buy drugs. Who bought the ring? His lawyer, who retrieved it and kept it safe as Manley battled a cocaine addiction that got him kicked out of the league in 1991.

Manley has been straight since 2006. He’ll get the ring back this weekend. His lawyer, John O’Quinn, died last year, but he left explicit instructions on how to handle the ring and when to return it to Manley.

Check out this piece in today’s Washington Post. It’s a great story about how a lawyer believed in and stuck by his client, even through dark days.

It was all a misunderstanding over “Who Dat?” Really it was.

That’s what I’d say too if I’d stepped in it and aggravated as many people as the justifiably excited fan base of the Super Bowl-bound New Orleans Saints.

And I wish this blog could take credit for getting the National Football League to “fold ’em,” as I suggested yesterday, but I don’t think that was quite the case, though fold they did.

New Orleans TV station WDSU has the story.

To recap: The NFL was busting bad on New Orleans T-shirt vendors who dared to put the Saints’ rallying cry, “Who Dat?” on shirts not licensed to the league. The league apparently claimed the phrase was their trademark, and the vendors were infringing.

But that was the misunderstanding. What they meant to say is that shirt vendors shouldn’t and couldn’t sell T-shirts with “Who Dat?” and the Saints’ fleur-de-lis logo, which undoubtedly is a trademark they own.

Trademarks like that one are worth a lot of money. Why do you think the NFL and the Washington Redskins fought so hard against the Native American tribes who tried to void their marks?

So now people in the Big Easy can rest easy and spend their time laissezing les bon temps roulez and getting ready for the Indianapolis Colts.

Hey, anytime someone puts a horseshoe above a door for good luck, is that a violation of the Colts’ trademark? Just asking.

Super Bowl note: The long-downtrodden New Orleans Saints make it to the Super Bowl for the first time in their 43-year history, and the National Football League issues heavy-handed ceast-and-desist letters to local vendors pushing T-shirts with the words of the signature Saints chant, “Who Dat?”

The NFL claims it has a trademark on the phrase and it will sue to enforce said trademark.

The full phrase is “Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Saints?” It’s often shortened to just “Who Dat?” The NFL apparently believes the phrase is so closely associated with the team that they have a trademark. ESPN notes that the origins are a little murky, possibly dating back to 19th century minstrel shows.

Nice way to stink up a victory party, guys. New Orleans endures years of awful teams, including a stretch so bad some fans put bags on their heads to cheer “the ’Aints.” They didn’t have a winning season until the late 1980s. Hurricane Katrina devastated the region in 2005, and the Saints became a unifying force to a community still working its way back to normal. My next-door neighbor’s daughter is a lawyer in New Orleans, and he told me she said people were in the streets crying from sheer joy after the Saints’ NFC championship victory.

It goes without saying this run-up week should be about the Saints playing the Indianapolis Colts in Miami, not who’s going to sue whom. But a number of Louisiana state officials are rattling their own legal sabers right back. Gov. Bobby Jindal is making noises about a lawsuit. And U.S. Sen. David Vitter wrote NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, “Please either drop your present ridiculous position or sue me.”

A noted poet-philosopher – well, Kenny Rogers — once observed, “You gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away,” etc.

The gurus at the NFL ought to know this is one to fold, even if they hold a winning hand.

The Washington Redskins have been lame this season (3-6). Their front office has been a model of dysfunctionality. Head coach Jim Zorn, a good guy, has deserved far, far better than he’s gotten (some of us remember when Zorn was slinging touchdowns for the Seattle Seahawks).

Enter the U.S. Supreme Court, which today handed the team a victory it probably will value even more than yesterday’s 27-17 thumping of the Denver Broncos. According to CNN, the high court has declined to take the appeal of a Native American group that attacked the name as disparaging and sought cancellation of the team’s highly lucrative trademarks.

The group had prevailed at the Patent Office appeals board stage; that body nixed the trademarks. The team appealed through the courts, ultimately prevailing on a laches argument: In other words, the complaining parties waited too long to make their claim. The “Redskins” name was formally registered in 1967. The suit was filed in 1992.