Playing the name game
Personal brands, registered trade marks and an off-pitch contest between Manchester United and Chelsea.
It is not often that a story featuring trade marks makes the sport section of major news websites. However, one story that did was the apparent delaying of José Mourinho’s appointment as Manchester United manager last summer owing to a trade mark dispute between Manchester United and Chelsea.
During Mourinho’s tenure as manager of Chelsea, the football club registered JOSE MOURINHO as a trade mark in jurisdictions including the UK and EU. It was the fact that these trade marks stood in the name of Chelsea rather than Mourinho himself that caused the apparent dispute
to arise. This story touches on an interesting area of trade mark law: that of “own name” trade marks.
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