20 February 2013Trademarks

Gordon Ramsay hands over ‘Spotted Pig’ trademark

TV chef Gordon Ramsay obtained the UK trademark for ‘The Spotted Pig’ on February 15 before immediately handing it to the owners of a New York restaurant with the same name.

Chefs April Bloomfield and Mario Batali own the Spotted Pig restaurant in Manhattan, as well as the trademark rights to the restaurant name in the US, Spain and Italy.

Fellow chefs Anthony Bourdain and Jamie Oliver publicly criticised Ramsay after he applied for rights to the ‘Spotted Pig’ mark late last year, with Bourdain describing the move as “shameful and pathetic”.

A spokesperson for Gordon Ramsay Holdings said in a statement after the mark was registered: “We have been liaising with The Spotted Pig in New York for some months and had arranged for the trademark to be passed to them once it was registered. This has now happened.”

Siân Croxon, a partner at DLA Piper LLP in London, said it was uncommon for someone to hand a trademark to another party after registering the mark, and that there would need to be a motive, usually commercial, behind such a decision.

“On the whole, if you get yourself a trademark you hang on to it unless you either agree to, or have to, give it up,” she said.

“Trademarks are national rights, so there was nothing to stop the application being filed, because there was no prior application by Batali and Bloomfield that would have blocked it,” she added.

She said Bloomfield and Batali could have opposed the UK application within two months of its filing: “There are some grounds – not straightforward – on which they could say that the mark should not have been granted to somebody else, but they would have had arguments that they could have raised.”

Bloomfield and Batali will become the registered proprietors of the mark after an assignment of the rights has been filed at the UK’s Intellectual Property Office, which can take several weeks.

The trademark, which will be effective in the UK for 10 years, covers range of goods and services that range from “services for providing food and drink” to “clothing, footwear [and] headgear”.

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