First off, IANAL (I am not a lawyer), so take this for what it's worth...
Number one: I'd
immediately call FIRST, and discuss the situation with them.
You really have two issues here: The team NUMBER, and the team's NAME.
Personally, I've
never before heard of a case of "team moving" and the sponsor taking their number with them. That seems absurd... All team numbers are ASSIGNED to the teams by FIRST. Therefore, THEY are the ones who control who gets and can use it, NOT the sponsor.
As I understand it (but could be wrong), the team number is
always a part of the School. Although sponsors come and go, the team number NORMALLY stays with the originally assigned school system.
In fact, from my previous conversations with FIRST as Team Contact, current FIRST policy won't even reassign a school's team number when a team becomes "dormant", just in case they ever DO "rise from the ashes" later. I registered a new team during 2002 right in the middle of the "1K team number rollover" time. RCs set to numbers over 1000 didn't display, the rules required a display of your team number, and no one knew THEN just WHEN the new RC's would have four digits. So out of curiousity we asked IF the new RCs didn't make the contest, would they consider reassigning dormant team numbers under 1000 to the new teams. FIRST officially told us "no", and cited the above reason.
Next, the current Team Contact is irrelevant. The Team Contact can EASILY be changed from an old sponsor to an "authorized school official" at ANY time with only a simple phone call to FIRST's MIS department by the school's administration. No sweat.
Now the team's SLANG NAME is a
whole different story! Many teams use variants of a sponsor's name, the sponsor's logo (etc.), ALL of which ARE copyrighted by the sponsoring company involved. (For example: Assume you were the "GM&Ms", were sponsored by GM *and* M&M Candies, used some variant of either GM's or M&M's logo, and either GM or M&M Candies dropped sponsorship of you. I think it fairly reasonable to EXPECT a name AND a logo change...)
However, if your names and/or logos do NOT have a direct derivative name connection with your sponsor, it gets a bit gray...
Now if the sponsor actually went to the trouble to register the name and/or the logo as Registered Trademarks of their company, then YES, you've got a problem. It's probably time to choose a new name, but again talk to a lawyer first. IF NOT though, ownership may be an issue, and you MAY be able to retrieve rights to the name for the team.
Any way you look at it though, my advice is to have a school rep call FIRST right away, and lay out the problem. I'm sure THEIR legal department should be able to help answer ALL of your questions.
Good luck!
- Keith