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  • 6 weeks ago
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00:00Let's get to this lawsuit that we found out about right before the NCAA tournament, Sam,
00:03and that was DraftKings being sued by the NCAA for infringing upon college basketball trademarks.
00:12Should DraftKings have been more careful with this, Sam? Should they have not used these? Or
00:16generally speaking, we see so much infringement through the years that's not caught or not
00:21enforced. Was this one of those simply that was caught or did DraftKings really go too far?
00:30Yeah, well, DraftKings certainly does not think it went too far. It certainly does not think that it
00:35shouldn't have used the name March Madness on its betting markets on the app. You know, when you
00:40go to bet on the NCAA tournament, you open it up, you click college basketball, and it says March
00:44Madness Games. DraftKings says that was to have a distinction between any other sport that it
00:50offers. It does a similar, you know, a similar thing with the NIT, and it argues that it's not
00:54actually using the March Madness logo or the trademark in that sense, but it's protected by
00:59the First Amendment free speech. So DraftKings definitely does not think that it did anything
01:03wrong here. They've asserted that multiple times. The NCAA, meanwhile, which, you know,
01:07the lawsuit just kind of came on the second day of the tournament, sort of out of nowhere.
01:11They've been very vocal about wanting the case to move very fast before next year's tournament.
01:17They filed with the district court just yesterday, urging them to speed up the timeline for the
01:24trial so that March Madness is not underway again next year, and DraftKings is using the
01:29same thing. They say the trial will probably take, you know, pretty quickly and not that long.
01:35But notably, we've had other sportsbooks kind of change what they're doing as a result. We had
01:38that MGM stop using the term March Madness. I think they call them men's March tournament games
01:44instead. So it's always interesting with the nuances of, you know, what these sportsbooks and other
01:49platforms are able to offer. You know, if you go on Kyle's Street or Polymarket, for example, which
01:53doesn't have a deal with the NCAA or the NFL for that matter, they talk about the Super Bowl as
01:59the
01:59big game. You know, there's other ways to try to allude to this. So I think that's what the NCAA
02:03is
02:03trying to argue that DraftKings should have done here and DraftKings saying, you know, you don't have
02:07a license on just the words March Madness.
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