It also helps to remember that trademark rights exist before and beyond this whole system of federal registration. You don’t need to register to use a name, or to hold rights to it: There are various common-law and state-law trademark rights that exist outside the federal registration system. You don’t need to register a trademark to print it on labels, license it out to other companies or even go to court to enforce it. That last part, though, is what the federal registration system tries to prevent, with a centralized database that shows which marks have been claimed for which goods and services and by whom. The more people use the database, the less likely it is that disputes arise — so the Lanham Act rewards registrants by giving them the legal high ground should they ever end up in court. There’s always the chance that a court might declare a trademark invalid, but having the registration means that’s less likely.

All of this creates some ambiguity around what federal registration actually is, in a much larger sense. A trademark is a kind of intellectual property that can be owned or licensed — but a trademark registration isn’t the same thing as a trademark. If it were, things would be simpler: Lee v. Tam would be a case about whether the government can take away all intellectual property rights over the content of speech, and the answer would likely be no. But simply registering trademarks in a federal system actually seems closer to “government speech,” which is a general exception to free speech: The government might be prevented from censoring the public, but it is allowed to censor itself. By banning the registration of slurs as trademarks, it can prevent itself from being forced to place its imprimatur on those slurs. Of course, given the accompanying legal benefits of registration, it winds up denying applicants far more than just an imprimatur.

Federal registration is the T.S.A. PreCheck of intellectual-property law: Not everyone has to get it, but if you do a lot of business, you probably should. The problem is that in the Slants’ case, the trademark office has come to look a bit like the popular image of the T.S.A.: a bureaucracy of bored enforcers just trying to churn through the queue and get through the day. Except that every now and then, something complicated comes down the screening belt, or someone gets a little overzealous about the job, and everyone winds up looking bad.

The patent office’s first refusal to register the Slants runs 49 pages, including attachments. Attachment 1 is a screenshot of user-submitted content from Urban Dictionary, whose top definition for “slant” reads, “A derogatory term used to refer to those of Asian descent. More accurately, it tends to refer to anybody with slanted eyes.” Attachments 14 through 31 contain the full Wikipedia article for “List of ethnic slurs,” with “Slant-eye/Slant” helpfully highlighted by the examining attorney. Attachment 34 is a post from a gossip blog featuring a photo of Miley Cyrus pulling her eyes back with her hands to make them slant, while sitting next to a young Asian man.

It’s not as though Tam didn’t know what “slant” could mean. When he was first putting together the band, he knew that he wanted his music to celebrate Asian-Americans as a group, to bridge multiple ethnicities by capturing a common experience. So he asked his friends, “Hey, what’s something you think all Asians have in common?” The first person to respond said, “Slanted eyes.”

“I thought that was interesting,” Tam told me, “because No 1., it’s not true. But No. 2, we can talk about our slant on life on what it’s like to be people of color.” The Slants, he said, are hardly the first rock band to reclaim “stigmatizing labels” in order to “throw them back” in others’ faces: “I grew up with bands like the Queers, Pansy Division — groups who take it and flip these assumptions on their heads.” In his experience, “Asian-Americans generally get it,” he said. “They think it’s funny. Sly.” It was white people who sometimes choked on it — but that, for Tam, was what made it such a great conversation starter.

Shortly after receiving their initial refusal from the patent office, the Slants sent a response explaining that “Applicant’s Mark, as used ... is a positive term of self-reference that promotes cultural pride and recognition.” The response included several exhibits, including declarations from longtime Asian-American community organizers. The office replied with yet another refusal, just as lengthy and full of screenshots as the last one. This strange back-and-forth went on for over a year. In June 2011, the Slants submitted a 250-page request for reconsideration that included the results of a survey designed by two university professors, who concluded that few members of the Asian and Pacific Islander community viewed “the Slants” as disparaging. The office responded with a 157-page denial that included more dictionary definitions, arguments in internet forums and, strangest of all, the comments thread under a blog post about the trademark dispute itself. In the comments, the blogger opines that the Slants’ name “would be like a black performer calling himself the N-word.” The writer continued, “It would be ridiculous and people would see that performer as ridiculous.” Then, Tam himself barges into the thread the office cites, with a long, detailed response that begins by pointing out that the “N” in the name of the rap group N.W.A. stands for the N-word.