MLB and OWL could be set for legal tussle over logo similarities

The Overwatch League could be about to face its latest hurdle, a legal challenge from Major League Baseball, over OWL’s logo.

This comes from the law firm Morrison Lee, who report that MLB, after seeing the Overwatch League’s logo in a weekly newsletter roundup of new corporate logos. This is the first time I’ve heard of an American newsletter showing off all of the new logos, but the more you know, I guess.

The newsletter, entitled The Official Gazette, serves two purposes. One is that it shows off all of the sweet logos filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, but secondly it also gives other parties a 30 day window with which to file objections regarding a trademark. MLB has filed a request for an extension to file their opposition to the logo, which has been accepted.

This doesn’t mean that MLB and Blizzard are about to engage in a legal throwdown of course, just that MLB are considering their options. “It’s hard to argue that there’s some no likeness here and it is hard to deny that the Overwatch League logo may have been inspired by the MLB logo,” says the article on Morrison Lee. “Tracer acts as the baseball player pictured in MLB’s logo. She faces the same direction and separates the contrasting colors of the League’s brand. Additionally, the logo is the same rectangular shape and dons virtually the same text layout despite the different fonts.”

However, the big question isn’t whether the two are similar, but whether it appears OWL is trying to cash in on the MLB’s commercial property with the logo.

We’ll see how this pans out, but in the meantime, check out the Morrison Lee piece, which examines it legally in great detail.