Image rights
England and Wales has no standalone image right, so protection has to be assembled from passing off, registered trade marks, contract and data protection.
Practice
Sport.
Sport sits with brands more than with content. A club, a competition and an athlete are each a brand before they are anything else, and most of what goes wrong here is an argument about a name, a likeness, or the right to sell an association with one of them.
What sits here
Sport sits alongside music and media rather than underneath either of them. It borrows from both. There is copyright in a broadcast and in the content a club publishes, and there is a great deal of contract underneath everything. But the centre of gravity is brand. What is being sold is a name, a badge, a likeness and an association, and what is being fought over is who controls those things and who is entitled to imply one. These pages are arranged the way the problems arrive rather than the way the law is organised.
What we handle
Sponsorship and endorsement
What a sponsor is actually buying, how category exclusivity, territory and term are defined, and what happens when a deal ends badly.
Agents and representation
Arrangements between an athlete and the people acting for them, and disputes about commission, exclusivity and how the relationship is ended.
Broadcast and event rights
What a rights holder actually controls at a venue, how access and accreditation work, and what can be done about a feed redistributed without permission.
Club and competition brands
Club marks, official merchandise, counterfeits sold around fixtures and online, and businesses trading on an association they do not have.
How this usually arrives
Most often somebody has used a name or a face. A brand builds a campaign around a fixture without buying anything. A product appears carrying an athlete's likeness. A betting or supplement business implies an endorsement that was never given. It arrives urgently, because the use is live and the event it is attached to will be over shortly.
The second route is a relationship ending. A sponsor wants out, or a rights holder wants a sponsor out, or an athlete changes club, or somebody who was represented no longer wishes to be. Everything that was comfortable while it was working becomes a question of what was actually signed, and the answer is generally narrower than either side remembers.
The third is volume. Counterfeit merchandise around a ground and online, a feed being redistributed while the fixture is still being played, listings that reappear as fast as they come down. That is not a dispute with an opponent. It is an operational problem with a legal component, and it is handled differently.
When to spend nothing
Not everything that infringes is worth acting on. A supporters group, a fanzine, a small fan account and an unofficial banner cost nothing and generate the attachment the commercial side depends on. Enforcing against your own supporters is a public act, and it becomes a story about you rather than about them. The stall outside the ground is a similar calculation, because the person selling is replaceable and the person supplying is not.
There is also the case where responding gives something an audience it never had. A campaign that gestures at an event without using anything protected is frequently best ignored, because a complaint is the only thing that will make anybody notice it.
Insights
Reading on sport
- Endorsement agreements, and the obligations that outlive them
- Representation agreements, and what an athlete is actually granting
- Unauthorised streams of a live event, and who is entitled to act
- Unauthorised use of an athlete's likeness, and what actually reaches it
Sport
What sits under sport
Before anything is sent
Positions harden the moment the other side takes advice, and the quiet routes stop being available once a demand has gone out. While nothing has been sent, everything is still open.