China’s Supreme Court has ruled in favour of basketball legend Michael Jordan in a long-running trademark dispute, ending an eight-year legal battle with a Chinese sportswear firm that illegally used his name.<\/p>\n
Upholding intellectual property rights is one of the core disputes of the US-China trade war, and a phase one deal signed in January saw Beijing pledge to improve protections of intellectual property.<\/p>\n
The landmark ruling, made late last month, prohibits the Fujian-based Qiaodan Sports from using the Chinese translation of Jordan’s name, Qiao Dan.<\/p>\n
The retired Chicago Bulls player and six-time NBA championship winner has a huge following in China, a country that has legions of avid basketball fans.<\/p>\n
The Supreme Court decision overturns two previous verdicts in favour of the Chinese firm.<\/p>\n
However, it still allows the firm to continue using its logo of a silhouetted basketball player — which has similarities with the “Jumpman” logo used by Nike to promote its “Air Jordan” line of sports shoes.<\/p>\n
However the Supreme Court referred the case over the use of the logo for retrial by the State Intellectual Property Office.<\/p>\n
In 2016, Jordan won the right to his name in Chinese characters, but the Supreme Court upheld the firm’s right to use its trademark “Qiaodan” in Romanised English.<\/p>\n
Qiaodan Sports said in a Weibo statement Tuesday that the ruling “would not impact the normal use of [its] existing trademarks, nor would it affect normal business operations.”<\/p>\n
Founded in 2000, the sportswear franchise operates more than 5,700 stores nationwide.<\/p>\n
It has also applied for nearly 200 similarly named trademarks including different Chinese spellings of “Qiaodan”, “Flying Power” and “Qiaodan King”, according to the verdict.<\/p>\n
In 2017, the sportswear brand New Balance was awarded 1.5 million in copyright damages by a Chinese court over its famous “N” logo, which was illegally copied by a local sports shoe firm.<\/p>\n
The verdict — a rare victory for a Western brand in a Chinese intellectual property infringement case — was announced shortly after US President Donald Trump launched a sweeping investigation into China’s record on intellectual property.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
China’s Supreme Court has ruled in favour of basketball legend Michael Jordan in a long-running trademark dispute, ending an eight-year legal battle with a Chinese sportswear firm that illegally used his name. Upholding intellectual property rights is one of the core disputes of the US-China trade war, and a phase one deal signed in January saw Beijing pledge to improve protections of intellectual property. The landmark ruling, made late last month, prohibits the Fujian-based Qiaodan Sports from using the Chinese translation of Jordan’s name, Qiao Dan. The retired Chicago Bulls…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26453,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26451"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26451"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26454,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26451\/revisions\/26454"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dinnews.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}