Australia vs. Warner Bros.?

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Natasha Frost, a reporter based in Melbourne.

It was a story that made for splashy, even sensational, headlines in the Australian press this week: The notion that Warner Bros., the American film and entertainment studio, could legally prevent Tasmania’s new Australian rules football team from being called the Tasmanian Devils.

The evidence for such a legal fight is scant. But concerns about the rights to the name of that stocky Australian animal, known for its pungent scent, loud screech and wanting table manners, have inflamed passions at even the highest reaches of government.

As Penny Wong, the foreign minister, said to an Australian radio station this week: “Like most Australians, I was pretty shocked to realize that Tassie devils was not a name that we had the rights over.”

Wong said she had ruled out calling President Biden over the name, she said, but suggested she was open to further recourse. “We’ll see what we can do,” she said.

The A.F.L. — the Australian Football League — is the only fully professional competition of Australian rules football, and it is something of an obsession for many in the country. Each year, 18 teams from five of Australia’s six states battle it out over a six-month season. So important is the league that in Victoria, the state I live in, the Friday before the Saturday Grand Final is a public holiday.

Some of these 18 teams represent an entire city, like the Adelaide Crows or the Sydney Swans. Others have dominion over a much smaller area: Nine of the 18 teams originate from different areas around Melbourne, and one of them, the Magpies, from the neighborhood of Collingwood, represents an area roughly half a square mile in size.

Yet Tasmania, Australia’s southernmost state, has never had an A.F.L. team, despite having a dedicated and engaged football-loving community.

The reasons are complex, but relate to questions about having a team in a state with just over half a million residents and a small media market, as well as a longstanding schism between the north and southern parts of the state that has affected almost every major decision about its development and government over 200 years.

For years, the people of Tasmania have lobbied to be included in the A.F.L. — and as of this week, they will be.

Gillon McLachlan, the chief executive of the A.F.L., on Wednesday announced that the league’s 19th franchise would be granted to Tasmania, with the team hopefully playing its first games in 2028. The news came days after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that the government would pay about a third of the total cost (240 million Australian dollars, or about $162 million) for a new 23,000-seat stadium in Hobart, the Tasmanian capital.

What McLachlan did not announce definitively was what the team would be called.

“Devils seems to make sense to me,” he said, but suggested that rights concerns could be an issue. He added: “I know there are broad-minded people at Warner Bros.”

This off-the-cuff comment has caused a ruckus in Australia, where it was widely interpreted to mean that Warner Bros. held the rights to the words “Tasmanian devils.”

In fact, such a thing is all but impossible, said Blair Beven, an intellectual property lawyer in Sydney and a partner at the commercial law firm Holding Redlich. “It’s highly unlikely that someone would be granted a monopoly in those words,” he said.

“Warner Bros. have trademarked a very specific representation of the Tasmanian devil. They’ve got the Tasmanian devil as a cartoon character, and then underneath they actually call it ‘The Tasmanian Devil,’” he said. “Now, I would go as far as to say, in my humble legal opinion, that trademark doesn’t give them ownership over the words on their own.”

What Warner Bros. does have rights to is the Looney Tunes character Taz, he said. And so, if the Tasmanian A.F.L. team eventually takes its name from the island state’s most famous marsupial, and wants a mascot to match, club officials should go to every possible length to make sure there’s no room for a mix-up, Beven said.

There’s some precedent here. Kangaroos, an arguably more mainstream marsupial, appear in hundreds of different trademarks, including that of Qantas, Australia’s national carrier, and on the Australian Grown logo, which is slapped on food that has been grown or produced in Australia.

Of course, Tasmania’s new A.F.L. team may decide not to name itself the Devils after all. (Doing so might create other potential for confusion: Melbourne’s own football club — as opposed to those of its suburbs — goes by the Demons.)

Now for the week’s stories.