Intellectual Property

Intellectual Property

In sports there are so many intellectual property issues that exist. Lawyers make millions a year just on intellectual property issues alone. Intellectual property is any product of someone's intellect that has commercial value, especially copyrighted material, patents, and trademarks. So with sports you can see how this could be a problem if not managed properly. For example when you leave from a sporting event in Los Angeles and you’re on your way to the car you run into entrepreneurs selling knock-off products of your teams merchandise. If the product is no good it can hurt the teams image. Intellectual property laws protect the sports teams and athletes to patent and copyright their merchandise, use of athletes names and use of their logos and identity marks (Abromson, 2010)

One issue in the last few years that has raised in when a player or coach gets traded to another team and gives their old teams secrets to other teams. This happened when Bret Farve was traded from the Green Bay Packer to the NY Jets. He supposedly shared the Packers plays with other teams that play against the Packers. With not enough proof about the accused conversations, no legal actions were ever taken. The are laws in place that exist, that if an investigation proved that Farve did that, he could be punished by the NFL’s new conduct policy for conduct detrimental to the League and his team. (Abromson, 2010)

Another intellectual property issue in sports is branding with an athlete. This has become huge in the media and advertising. Every product you can think of is showed during the NFL’s premiere championship game, the Super Bowl. Most of the commercial involves their players from the league. It doesn’t just stop there, think of people like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, George Forman, Magic Johnson, Dwayne Wade, Mohammad Ali etc. Because the sports industry is so huge and so popular it has become a big business move to get the consumers to see their favorite sports icon use a certain product. (Abromson, 2010)

Abromson, H. (2010). The Uniform domain name dispute resolution policy: will
alternative dispute resolution succeed where the courts have not?. Abromson on Sports Law, Retrieved from http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~rcrlj/articlespdf/abromson.pdf

Abromson, H. (2010). Favre should learn to keep a secret; a trade secret that
is. Abromson on Sports Law, Retrieved from http://www.abromsononsportslaw.com/Favre.html

Abromson, H. (2010). Branding with an athlete spokesperson. Abromson on Sports
Law, Retrieved from http://www.abromsononsportslaw.com/branding.html