1 4 December 2003

News:

A German Appeal Court has upheld the landmark decision to prevent EA Sports from using Oliver Kahn’s name and image in a football computer game without his consent.

The EU Commission’s intervention in the FA Premier League broadcasting rights sale to British Sky Broadcasting underlines its determination to play a more active role in the sports world.

The Legal Advisor to the Information Commissioner (IC), Nicholas Tyler, will be speaking at a half-day event in London, organised by e-commercelaw&policy, which will explain the new guidelines on Subject Access in the light of the December 8 Court of Appeal decision in the case of Michael John Durant v The Financial Services Authority.

Features:

In a recent edition of this publication, CAS arbitrator Professor Richard McLaren hailed the new World Anti-Doping Code as ushering in ‘a new era in the control of performance enhancing drugs.’1 This article builds upon that welcome by highlighting the key features of the new Code, outlining the proposed implementation process, and identifying likely themes arising in relation to potential legal challenges to the Code.

The UK government’s new draft Gambling Bill promises sports businesses the possibility of novel kinds of engagement with the casino industry. In re-engineering the legislative environment in which casinos operate, the government envisages multi-purpose leisure developments as focal points for regional development, and sports organisations with more than 5,000 square feet of spare space (see below) will be in a particularly good position to exploit the new regulatory regime.

The draft EU Directive on the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights is causing deep divisions in Brussels, as the European Parliament and Member States struggle to agree on its scope and content. The draft Directive, presented in January 2003, covers infringement of all intellectual property rights (both copyright and industrial property, such as trademarks, patents and designs) deriving from Community and European law. This article aims to give an overview of the draft Directive and to highlight areas of controversy and uncertainty. In particular, while the Directive is not expected to have a significant impact on the UK’s enforcement system, there are particular concerns over potential changes to the liability of internet service providers (“ISPs”) and new prescriptive rules for both civil and criminal sanctions.

Despite the growing press and public awareness of “image rights”, there is still no single defined concept of such a right under UK law. Any celebrity seeking to protect their image has to rely on a matrix of rights. Those rights include the law of passing off (as featured in the Eddie Irvine, Ian Botham and David Beckham examples), copyright, privacy, defamation, data protection, trade descriptions and advertising codes of practice and, of course, basic contractual rights. This article look at how have those rights have developed over the last year and what the situations is now.

This article looks at the problem of domain name hijacking and the means available to resolve disputes regarding the ownership of sports-related domain names.