On 14 September 2025, the AIPPI Young Members Initiative Committee hosted the AIPPI Café session on the topic of “Sports and IP”. Chihiro Wein (Japan), Jaewon Yoon (Korea) and Andy Yu (Hong Kong China) jointly represented the Committee in facilitating the session. This topic came as a timely discussion in the industry especially in view of the upcoming Asian Games to be held in Japan in 2026 and coincidentally, the 2025 World Athletics Championship was also held in Tokyo during the AIPPI World Congress period.

During the session, the attendees delved into two major topics, namely, (a) ambush marketing and (b) IP protection and commercialisation of name, image and likeliness. The AIPPI Café session was highly popular where more than 30 attendees across different member groups participated in the lively discussion exchanging their insights and experience from a multi-jurisdictional perspective.

In terms of ambush marketing, the attendees generally agreed that a contractual arrangement between the event organizers and the audience is more suitable to protect the rights and interests of event sponsors against brand owners deploying innovative ways to conduct ambush marketing, although some attendees raised another legitimate question of whether or not such arrangement may fall foul of the parameter of other areas of laws such as competition and anti-trust laws.

As regards the protection and commercialisation of athletes’ IP rights including their names, images and likeliness, the attendees discussed the challenges of balancing cost / resources against the desire to secure comprehensive protection in a cost-effective manner especially for trade mark registration where protection is granted based on coverage of goods/services. One of the attendees has also shared his experience that it is common in the football industry to register the names of young players as trade mark early on before they become famous, while some others mentioned that athletes’ names may not be readily registrable in some jurisdictions as they should not be treated as trade mark on a prima facie case.

We look forward to discussing this interesting topic in future events!