The PWHL Could Be Inviting a Date With Taylor Swift’s Legal Team

After a successful inaugural season, the Professional Women’s Hockey League announced new names and logos for its six franchises in September. The Toronto Sceptres rebrand, in particular, was met with a unique reception.

The team’s “TS” logo is reminiscent of a monogram worn in Taylor Swift’s 2014 “Shake It Off” music video. Both initial logos are yellow and blue with the stem of the “T” running through the “S.” Fans immediately latched on to the comparison online, passing it around both Swiftie and hockey circles.

But the similarity leaped out of the social media fringes as The Eras Tour prepared to touch down in Toronto. On Nov. 12, a few days before the first of six shows at the Rogers Centre, the official Sceptres account posted a video of two players unboxing custom jerseys designed for Swift and tour opener Gracie Abrams. The idea for the gift came from local tourism group Destination Toronto, which used Swift’s lucky number 13.

The Sceptres said they “can’t wait to see you rep” the custom jersey with a winking emoji, alluding to Swift’s album reputation—a direct mention of her intellectual property to market itself. The team also shared a link to the PWHL store for “anyone looking to get their own Toronto Sceptres jersey” in a reply post to the video, and has posted about the concert a number of other times.

The logo itself already raised questions of a trademark issue, but the jersey and social media video opened a Pandora’s box of legal concerns, experts tell Front Office Sports.

By connecting Swift to their brand, the Sceptres created legal issues that could lead to private or public opposition from the singer, who has extensive intellectual property rights worldwide. And the entire PWHL could be at risk, too, since the league is centrally owned and responsible for all its franchises.

“What the tourism board and what the team have now done is highlighted that [similarity] for everybody to see. So in some ways, if [Swift] would have been fine with it before, she might now feel compelled to address it,” Alexandra Roberts, an expert on trademark law and professor of law and media at Northeastern University, tells FOS. “It’s kind of bold what they did.”

Menisha Moses of Destination Toronto says she brought her idea for the jerseys to the hockey team, which eagerly jumped on board. “[The Sceptres] definitely seemed that they wanted to lean in to it because they thought it was funny,” Moses says. “To them, it felt like, what better brand to be associated with or linked to?” (Moses made sure the jerseys got to the singers, but her email to their representatives about the gifts has not received a reply.)

The PWHL isn’t unaware of the comparisons to Swift. “We admire Taylor Swift’s dedication to female advancement and empowerment, values that the PWHL proudly shares,” the league said in a statement in September, after the discourse around the logo similarities became too big to ignore. Even one of the league’s broadcast partners, CBC Sports, posted a video seeing whether concertgoers could tell the difference between the two logos.

“While we welcome the comparison to Taylor, our logo started with the Sceptre symbol at its core, with the top and bottom points of an ornamented rod. From that starting point, the Toronto Sceptres logo was born,” the league said.

It’s not a leap to conclude that Swift gave her blessing to the logo, the jersey, or the team, and Roberts says that the implication could open the Sceptres and the PWHL to litigation, especially with how the team leaned in to Swift’s trip to Toronto.

Making the custom jersey and publicly linking it to Swift are moves that flirt with an element of trademark law called false endorsement. According to the Lanham Act, which dictates U.S. trademark law, an entity “shall be liable in a civil action” if it uses someone’s identity to promote a product or service in a way that could mislead consumers into thinking that person gave their sponsorship or approval to that good or service.

The other big issue for the PWHL is called right of publicity, which is a statute in more than half of U.S. states banning the unauthorized use of someone’s name, image, or likeness for commercial purposes. Not to be confused with the NIL deal revolution disrupting college athletics, right of publicity is straightforward: “TS” and “Swift” were both used, and courts often treat content coming from an official brand account as commercial use. Plus, the team dropped that link to buy their jerseys in a reply to the post about Swift. Because of her extensive intellectual property claims, Swift could try to get a court in a number of states to make the Sceptres stop using her NIL for marketing.

“If I were Swift’s team, I would feel like, ‘O.K., this might not be a one-off, this is something they keep doing,’” Roberts says. “So I’m going to let them know that they should take it easy before they start mass manufacturing shirts that actually say Swift and selling them to fans.” (The PWHL does not sell Sceptres merchandise with Swift’s name.)

In addition to claiming false endorsement or right of publicity, Swift could oppose the PWHL’s trademark application for the Sceptres with a letter of protest grounded in her common law rights, meaning her long history of using “TS” marks.

“If Taylor Swift’s folks had not consented to this, you’d probably expect them to oppose this trademark application … because it’s for clothing and other things that Taylor Swift also would want to use her ‘TS’ marks on,” trademark attorney Carissa Weiss tells FOS. (The Sceptres do sell merchandise with the “TS” logo on a white background, as Swift’s appears in the music video.) There’s also a possibility Swift could argue a copyright claim—saying the stylized yellow “TS” is her artistic work—if she owned or registered the copyright for the “TS” in the “Shake It Off” video.

Roberts says it’s more likely that if Swift does take action against the Sceptres and PWHL, the fight won’t be public. Instead of going to court, Swift’s team could simply send along a private cease-and-desist letter or make a call: “She could say, ‘I support women’s sports and I don’t want to battle with this new team, but I’m going to let them know behind the scenes either that they should change their logo a little bit, or that they should not use my name again in any marketing efforts in the future.’”

Moses of Destination Toronto says she doesn’t believe there was any contact between the PWHL and Swift’s team before she linked the two. And it’s still not clear whether they’ve talked: The PWHL declined an interview and further comment on this story, the Sceptres didn’t respond, and representatives for Swift did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Swift has responded to legal issues in the past with various intensity, but she’ll have to consider how any action against the PWHL could impact her sunny, feminist personal brand. As Roberts says, “I think she chooses very carefully who she wants to go to war with.”