Imagine the following scenario: You buy a house and over the next forty years the property significantly appreciates in value. The previous owner then threatens to terminate the sale unless you renegotiate the deal. This might sound absurd, but this is precisely what is happening to the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team.
In 1978, the Phillies hired a design company to create a mascot for the franchise. The following year, the designers sued the team, alleging copyright infringements for the team’s use of the mascot–the Phillie Phanatic. The suit was settled with the Phillies eventually paying the designers for ownership of the mascot.
In 2018, the designers wrote to the Phillies, claiming that they would terminate the team’s right to use the mascot unless the settlement was renegotiated. In June, the team sued the designers to stop them from following through on their threat.
Apparently, the value of the Phanatic has significantly appreciated in the forty years since its creation. While the designers might lament that fact, wishing that they hadn’t sold the rights, the fact is, they did sell the rights.
The right to property includes the freedom to trade material values on terms that we choose. The designers did this. They traded the rights to the Phanatic to the Phillies in exchange for $215,000. To threaten to terminate an agreement made nearly forty years ago is an attack on property rights.
If the designers are allowed to follow through with their threat then no contract or sale will be safe. If the parties to a trade of values can terminate that trade decades later, the very concept of a contract is destroyed. Let us hope that the Phillies prevail and property rights are protected.