[Peter Johnson]

I think this just shows how vulnerable teams are without the formalization of a 501c3 or being organized as a club under the auspices of a national organization such as 4-H. "Ownership" of equipment and donated money is hard to nail down when the team itself is legally fuzzy. Many FRC teams live in the limbo between a school team and an independent club (e.g. they have a faculty advisor, use school space and sometimes school equipment, but largely operate independently) so the news about 1432 hits awfully close to home ("it could happen to us!").

What defines the team? E.g. if all of the mentors and students started meeting somewhere else as "FRC Team XX", and then the school assigns a faculty advisor to "FRC Team XX" who holds meetings in the school lab with nobody else there, which is the real FRC Team XX? To some extent TIMS addresses this (assuming the faculty advisor isn't the primary team contact). However, items such as donated tools/cash are often donated to the school (so the donator gets a tax writeoff) with an agreement it's for team use. Unfortunately the team's ownership (vs. use) of such items is sometimes left poorly defined.

In some ways FIRST is similar to BSA in the way it's set up. BSA units have a "sponsoring organization" that acts as the legal owner (e.g. a school, church, or company) but needs to get an annual charter from BSA. I've not done research on this but I wonder if any troops have run into a similar issue with their respective sponsoring organization?

Now that FIRST has trademarked FRC and other terms, it may be able to better help teams protect themselves against such situations. Is there anything else FIRST could do to help provide teams with a better organizational framework and/or legal protections similar to what 4-H or BSA provide?