Posts Tagged: "hockey"

During the St. Louis Blues’ improbable run to their first Stanley Cup, the team found itself with an almost equally improbable new victory song—Laura Branigan’s 1982 disco-pop hit, “Gloria.” In early January 2019, five Blues players were in Philadelphia watching the Eagles-Bears NFL wild-card playoff game at a local dive bar, Jacks NYB. The song “Gloria” came on and a patron latched on to it, urging the bar to keep playing it during every commercial break. A few beers and an Eagles victory later, the bar’s chants of “Play Gloria!” have transformed it into a living meme. The Blues players brought the song into the locker room and out onto the ice, and the legend grew like a playoff beard through their epic Cup run. Now, after the ticker-tape has settled, Jacks NYB claims it owns trademark rights to the phrase “Play Gloria!”; they not only filed trademark applications for the phrase, but sent demand letters asserting their rights. It’s a move that feels a little too straight out of the TV show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. And like most other IP disputes that manage to reach the sports-channel crawl, it is rooted in some basic misunderstandings about the nature of trademarks.