Photo by Hannah Foslien/Getty Images.

As predicted, the Washington football team is appealing the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recent ruling to cancel the team’s trademark registration.

The Washington football team filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Distrct Court today against the five Native Americans who won the trademark case in June. According to a statement from the team, the appeal is “in the form of a complaint” filed before a federal judge, which means that it’s “effectively starting the litigation anew,” allowing the team to appeal to a higher court if they lose again.

In June, the Patent Office issued a ruling in Blackhorse v. Pro -Football, Inc., siding with the petitioners that the name of the team is a “racial slur and disparages Native Americans.” The lawsuit was originally filed in 2006 by the law firm Drinker, Biddle & Reath on behalf of petitioners Amanda Blackhorse, Phillip Glover, Marcus Briggs-Cloud, Jillian Pappan and Courtney Tsotigh, who were seeking “the cancellation of six different trademarks associated with the Washington NFL team.”

In a statement, the team’s trademark attorney, Bob Raskopf said that “we believe that the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ignored both federal case law and the weight of the evidence, and we look forward to having a federal court review this obviously flawed decision.”

According to their complaint, the team defends their name, explaining that it’s not only prideful and not disparaging to Native Americans, but that the Patent Board’s decision contains “many errors,” and that the “federal judge may disregard the Board’s decision entirely in conducting its own independent evaluation of the evidence.” Additionally, the complaint says that the Patent Board’s actions violates the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment.

“The Washington [football team] look forward to all of the issues in the case being heard in federal court under the federal rules of evidence,” Raskopf also said. “The team is optimistic that the court will correctly and carefully evaluate the proofs, listen to the arguments, and confirm the validity of the Washington [football teams’] federal trademark registrations, just as another federal court has already found in a virtually identical case.”