Metro

Brewskee-Ball league lawyers up in trademark case

Skee-Ball has moved from the seaside to the barroom — and now the courtroom.

The founders of a Brooklyn-based Skee-Ball league have raised more than $10,000 in donations to fight a trademark war waged by the Philadelphia-based originators of the classic arcade game.

The owners of the Brewskee-Ball bar league — which has expanded to Austin and San Francisco — were slapped with a Brooklyn federal lawsuit in 2010 over their trademarking of the name and have since hired pricey lawyers to fend off Skee-Ball’s suit.

Rallying under the motto, “Skee the People,” the forces behind Brewskee-Ball have asked supporters to start pouring cash into the legal defense coffers.

“After many months of costly but ineffective mediation, we were unable to reach a fair agreement,” reads a statement on the Brewskee-Ball website. “Now we’re finally heading to trial — and we need your help to continue funding this lawsuit and stand up to Skee-Ball, Inc.”

As of Thursday, Brewskee-Ball had raised $10,433 for the cause from 65 Skee-Ball zealots.

But an attorney for Skee-Ball, San Francisco-based Michael Idell, slammed the Williamsburg upstarts for falsely portraying the fight as a David and Goliath style mismatch.

“They’ve hired one of the most expensive trademark law firms in the country,” he said. “We’ve got four lawyers here. Skee-Ball is not some big company, this is a family-run business.”

Idell said that Skee-Ball, invented in Philadelphia in 1909, has been officially trademarked since 1928 and that the Brewskee-Ball name is a clear appropriation of the original article.

“You can’t be granted a trademark that includes somebody else’s trademark,” he said.