Broken Matt Hardy Trademark Request Denied

The House Hardy vs Impact Wrestling saga has been going on for months, and things escalated this week when Impact President Ed Nordholm released images of Matt Hardy’s contract along with confidential e-mails which featured his conversations with WWE regarding the gimmick.

Related: Impact Wrestling President Releases E-Mails From WWE, Matt Hardy Contract Excerpt, Hardys Respond

Both parties are claiming they are the rightful owners of the gimmick, and back in March, Matt Hardy applied for a “Broken Matt Hardy” trademark. Unfortunately for Matt Hardy, the request has been denied by the USPTO, and he has six months to respond to the trademark refusal or it will be abandoned.

The request refusal states:

“Registration is refused because the applied-for mark, as used on the specimen of record, identifies only the name of a particular character/personal name; it does not function as a service mark to identify and distinguish applicant’s services from those of others and to indicate the source of applicant’s services.”

PWInsider went a little deeper into the refusal while answering fan questions, and apparently the USPTO ruled that some of the evidence presented wasn’t not seen as valid.

“The USPTO decreed that the reasoning Hardy used in his petition didn’t hold up. Hardy used video evidence, which was dismissed as simply evidence of Hardy appearing on shows. The third one would have been approved, but since it was an advertisement for an appearance outside of the United States (Ireland), it was ruled that it wasn’t valid in this instance.”

This whole situation has become very convoluted and messy, and it seems like it’s only going to get worse before it ends.

It was recently reported that WWE officials would be interested in using the Broken Matt Hardy gimmick if Matt can acquire the rights to it, but the company doesn’t want to get involved in the legal battle.

Unfortunately the longer this battle goes on, the longer the fans lose, as people clearly want to see the Broken Hardys in WWE.

Whether or not it’s ever going to happen remains to be seen, as the great war between House Hardy and the Anthem owl-men continues.