On Friday 4th April Manuela Macchi (Keltie) will be joining a panel at the 29th Annual Intellectual Property Law Conference of the American Bar Association in Arlington, Virginia.

The Non-Traditional Trademarks and the Entertainment & Sports Industries CLE will be covered on Twitter (#IPLSpring) by Phillip Turner, a first-year law student at Belmont University College of Law in Nashville, Tennessee. Phillip explains further on the  ABA-IPL Law Student Action Group blog:

Your professional sports team client sends you an email wanting to protect their brand-new colors, a 3-D logo used on apparel, the hologram on their venue’s tickets, their theme music, and the smell of their official game ball.  These are not the typical trademark requests, but may have legal protections all the same. Non-Traditional Trademarks and the Entertainment & Sports Industry, will explore many types of non-traditional trademarks and help you with all your client’s unique trademark requests.

This seminar will concentrate on protection of non-traditional marks by getting you up-to-date on the current developments in this space.  Manuela Macchi (@KeltieLLP) will be joining the panel from London to bring an “EU perspective on the topic” and Len Glickman (@lenglickman) will be joining from Canada for perspective from our Northern neighbors.  For the global professional sports brand perspective, the panel includes Anastasia Danias, Senior Vice President and Chief Litigation Officer of the National Football League.  There is a competitive advantage in any country when attorneys know the procedures and regulations one may face to preserve and protect clients’ non-traditional marks.

The ABA Forum on the Entertainment & Sports Industries sponsors this CLE, however, the content will have practical applications into other industries that use non-traditional marks during everyday business.  As Len Glickman noted, “In-house counsel and private practitioners who have intellectual property practices that cross over to the entertainment and sports industries” will benefit greatly by attending.  Law students like myself will also benefit from this great line-up of speakers and topics.  American speaker Doug Rettew points out, “it will be very interesting to see how this contrasts and compares with the non-US jurisdictions presented by the other panelists.”

Non-Traditional Trademarks and the Entertainment & Sports Industries will be an entertaining and informative CLE that should not be missed this April.  In fact, I will be there live-Tweeting (#IPLSpring) during the seminar and plotting to trademark my own theme music!

Additional Info

Moderator:

• Leonard Glickman, Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP, Toronto, Canada

Speakers:

• Anastasia Danias, National Football League, New York, NY
• Manuela Macchi, Keltie LLP, London, United Kingdom
• Douglas (Chip) A. Rettew, Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner LLP, Washington, DC

If you can’t make it to the 29th Annual ABA Intellectual Property Law Section Spring Conference this year, you can still follow all the action by following the tweets and blog entries of the ABA-IPL’s Law Student Reporters, who will be covering all the events of the Conference on Twitter.  You do not have to sign up for Twitter to follow the Law Student Reports. Just bookmark this site and revisit the link from April 2-4, 2014 to follow all the action.

Mark Richardson 28 March 2014