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To: dangus
Little known fact: “Yankees” is only a nickname. The team’s official name is simply, “New York Baseball Club.”

They might want to look into changing that.

For many years the Pittsburgh Pirates were also officially the "Pittsburgh Baseball Club". Pirates was a nickname that was coined in the press after they were accused of "piracy" for signing Louis Bierbauer away from the Phillies in 1892. No one ever bothered to incorporate under the name Pittsburgh Pirates.

Then in the early 90's when the World Wide Web was becoming a thing an enterprising Pittsburgh bar owner went out and registered the domain "pittsburghpirates.com". He then attempted to extort a king's ransom from the team in order to have them buy it back. (the Bucs' first website was actually pirateball.com).

Litigation ensued, but there was a problem in that the plaintiff was officially the Pittsburgh Baseball Club and not the Pirates. This dragged on for several years. Eventually they managed to get control of the domain (I think after Federal laws were changed to prevent this sort of thing).

Shortly afterwards the team reincorporated as Pittsburgh Pirates, Inc.


21 posted on 07/23/2020 11:05:31 AM PDT by Buckeye McFrog (Patrick Henry would have been an anti-vaxxer)
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To: Buckeye McFrog

I’m QUITE certain they trademarked the name. The point is taht they’re still legally the New York Baseball Club.


46 posted on 07/23/2020 11:17:52 AM PDT by dangus
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