Disney has settled with the Portland Pickles baseball team following their lawsuit against the company for trademark infringement related to the Disney+ series Win or Lose.
Disney Settles with Portland Pickles
As WDWNT previously reported in early May, the baseball team known as the Portland Pickles filed a lawsuit against Disney, specifically stating that the Disney+ series Win or Lose infringed on the team’s trademark. The Portland Pickles is a summer league baseball team based in Portland, Oregon. Both the team’s name and its pickle-shaped mascot, named Dillon, were copyrighted in 2016.
Win or Lose, meanwhile, is a Disney+ original series that is set in the same universe as the Inside Out films. The series, which ran for a total of eight episodes, follows a middle school softball team known as the Peaks Valley Pickles, sometimes shortened to just the Pickles.
The original lawsuit filed by the Portland Pickles claimed that the name, logo, and related merchandise Disney created for the Peaks Valley Pickles were too close to the team’s existing trademarks. Specifically, the logo for the fictional team features a green pickle wearing a baseball uniform, which the lawsuit claimed was far too similar to Dillon. The Portland Pickles also noted that Disney “developed, marketed and sold merchandise bearing logos and themes that are substantially and confusingly similar to plaintiff’s Pickles marks.”
Disney sold merchandise for the fictional Peaks Valley Pickles at major retailers, including Walmart, Kohl’s, and Target. The Portland Pickles responded, saying, “Disney’s actions were not only intentional but brazen, leveraging their outsized market power to appropriate a brand identity with a decade of goodwill and fan devotion behind it.”
In a recent update from KGW8 News, it has been revealed that Disney has officially settled with the Portland Pickles regarding their trademark infringement lawsuit. Details of the dollar amount or potential injunction terms were not revealed, and the Pickles did not respond to requests for comment. However, they referred to their situation as “a classic case of David vs. Goliath.”
Win or Lose has already been in the news multiple times, as the series introduced one of Disney’s first openly Christian animated characters in nearly 20 years and once featured a storyline about a transgender student that was later cut from the show.
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