The company that manufactures Skee-Ball—the dull, repetitive game beloved by children and inebriated simpletons—is going after the Skee-Ball themed Williamsburg bar Full Circle, filing a lawsuit against the owners for trademark infringement. Full Circle has three Skee-Ball games, and owners Eric Pavony and Evan Tobias also founded a "Brewskee-Ball" League in 2005, after obtaining verbal permission from Skee-Ball, Inc. during a meeting with the company's CEO in Pennsylvania. But now it seems Skee-Ball has had a change of heart.
According to court documents, Pavony and Tobias were subsequently contacted by Skee-Ball reps in 2010, after the company saw how they'd popularized the game with their Brewskee-Ball league. The Full Circle owners say Skee-Ball wanted to work with them, and the two parties entered into a confidentiality agreement in order to discuss a collaboration. But a month later, Full Circle was served with a cease and desist letter, claiming that the bar's owners were violating Skee-Ball's trademark on the word skee-ball.
It's unclear what kind of damages Skee-Ball is seeking, but we hope whatever settlement is reached gets paid out in little tickets that can be redeemed for a Walkman. Robert Harkins, an attorney for Full Circle, tells us the bar "is not infringing on any valid Skee-Ball trademark. And there is no other way to describe a skee-ball machine that a normal person would understand, except to call it a skee-ball machine. So to have a company basically claim that you can't call the machines you own by their name is not legally proper, and it's not even good business."
Harkins has filed a motion to have the lawsuit dropped, arguing that Full Circle's use "constitutes fair use... particularly because Full Circle has only owned and used skee-ball games manufactured by SBI." It's a mystery why Skee-Ball decided to come after Full Circle after exploring a partnership, but a source familiar with the bar notes that the cease-and-desist letter came soon after Skee-Ball hired a marketing company based in San Francisco, where the lawsuit was originally filed. Harkins successfully got the lawsuit transferred to Brooklyn Federal Courtskee.
