Nike, tennis and Red Sox: 5 facts on sports and IP
As celebrations for World IP Day, which this year honoured “Reach for Gold: IP and Sports”, draw to a close, WIPR decided to look deeper at the relationship between sports and IP.
Below, you’ll find a selection of interesting facts and statistics.
But first, let’s kick off with a bonus fact: there’s only one registered smell trademark in the UK, in the name of Unicorn Products. The mark’s description: “The mark comprises of the strong smell of bitter beer applied to flights for darts”.
1. Tennis trademarks
In the UK, Wimbledon (tennis) filed its first trademark back in the 1880s. Cricket and golf only started filing in the 1970s/80s, meaning tennis was nearly a century of its competitors, according to Robert Reading, director of professional services and strategy at CompuMark, a Clarivate Analytics unit.
The All England Lawn Tennis Club (Wimbledon) has a trademark registration for ‘The Championship’ dating from 1884 (UK trademark number 40977), predating other major sports by more than 80 years.
‘Ping-Pong’ is still a registered trademark in the US. Owned by Indian Industries, US trademark number 0283766 is registered in Class 28 (Bats and rackets of the tennis type for games).
It was filed in 1930, but the US Patent and Trademark Office notes it was first used in 1902. “So, it's ok to call table tennis ‘ping pong’ in the UK but not in the US!,” said Reading.
2. Technical secrecy in motorsports
“Anybody close to Formula 1 will tell you that the very nature of a patent is an anathema to the sport; where closely guarded technical secrets represent the crucial tenths of second on the stopwatch and the difference between winning and losing,” said Ed White, director IP analytics at Derwent, a Clarivate unit.
Back in June 2011, the sport’s governing body published a new engine formula for the sport to be used from 2014.
It consists of 1.6 litre, six cylinder, turbo-hybrid engines, with two separate energy recovery systems for “self-charging” the battery: energy recovery from the brakes and from heat generated in the engine exhaust. The governing body also added a maximum 100 litre limit to the amount of fuel the car can use in any race.
White added: “Suddenly, outright performance was constrained, and efficiency became the key to winning. The crucible of innovation at the pinnacle of motorsport became tied to engine technologies with massive potential for the cars we buy.”
Patenting these technology developments would help to successful transfer the technology to the real world.
Derwent looked into the top two teams Mercedes and Ferrari, to see whether these developments were being patented. It uncovered nine patent applications, five for Mercedes and four for Ferrari, and with a very different flavour to the topics patented.
Ferrari’s patent applications are divided into two groups—torque control systems for the hybrid powertrain and a single patent concerning detection of “knocking”—turbulent burn of the air-fuel mix in the combustion chamber.
Mercedes F1’s patent applications, from their engine development entity Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains, are all battery related, specifically around the control of heat (always a big problem in a race car).
"The Mercedes F1 patents were not really patent filed in a committed manner and appear not to have granted, implying they wanted to publish the patents defensively to prevent others from patenting," said White. In contrast, the Ferrari patents in part appear to have been granted in Europe and the US. This, according to White, indicates that Ferrari wanted protection in both locations, it invested time in examination procedures to get them to grant and the patents covered valuable enough technologies for the legal fees they would undoubtedly entail. The US patent grants happened February through November last year, indicating the interest in these patented technologies is current and useful to the company. 3. Boston Red Sox trounce the competition
Meanwhile, in the US, there have been more than 64,000 trademark applications that include the word "baseball" in the specification of goods/services.
According to Clarivate, Major League Baseball owns approximately 8,000 trademarks in more than 70 registers around the world.
With 67 active US trademarks, and the oldest mark dating back to 1974, the Boston Red Sox take top sport for baseball clubs. The New York Yankees take second spot, with 62 active US trademarks, although they were the first to file, with their first application dated 1973.
The oldest currently active mark is US trademark number 0133114 for ‘Double Header’ and baseball device in the name of Rawlings Sporting Goods. Filed in 1919, the trademark celebrates its 100th anniversary on November 13 this year.
4. Football fever
Turning to football, Rangers Football Club in Scotland has the oldest UK trademark among major UK football teams. The clubs registration for its club emblem was filed in 1967.
The FA CUP is protected by UK trademark number 1501630, which was registered by The Football Association in 1992. It also has a trademark registration from 1978 covering the coat of arms.
And the Fédération Internationale de Football Association’s portfolio consists of 11,634 active trademarks, across 122 registers. Across 83 registers, The International Olympic Committee has nearly half the number of trademarks (6,451).
5. Nike dominates sports-related patents
US-based Nike is the top filer of sports-related international patent applications through the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO).
Between 2014 and 2018, the sporting goods company filed 239 applications. Nike is followed by Karsten Manufacturing Corporation, which manufactures golf equipment, with 77 applications. Taking the third spot is 3M Innovative Properties Company, which manages the IP rights of the 3M Company, with 44 applications.
In total, 2,078 sports-related applications under WIPO’s Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) were published by WIPO in 2018. This was a 9% increase on figures for 2017 (1,900 PCT applications) and a 41% increase on figures for 2014 (1,470 PCT applications).
Statistics were kindly provided by IP service provider Clarivate Analytics.
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