NIKE Trademark in Spain

In the news reports about the 1992 Summer Olympics, we heard quite a bit about NIKE's trademark problems in Spain. Apparently, NIKE paid substantial sums of money to have Olympic athletes wear clothing bearing its mark and then discovered that the NIKE mark was registered to another company in Spain for sportswear. Oops!

While the specific facts of this problem are newsworthy in that they affected the Olympic Games, this type of problem is quite common, even for medium-sized and small U.S. companies. The Spanish company just happened to have the NIKE mark in Spain, but this problem often arises in a much less innocent way. We may see distributors or licensees of an American company registering the American company's mark in their home countries. Then, when the distributorship agreement or the license terminates, the American company is closed out of some of its best foreign markets because its mark is owned by someone else. There are also trademark "pirates," who simply go around registering famous trademarks in various countries and then offer to sell the rights to the company that made the mark famous -- at a substantial premium.

What to do? If you are selling your products in a foreign country and your trademark is valuable to you in that country, you should register your mark there. Registration of a trademark in most countries costs about $1,000. You should also be sure to protect your marks when entering into distributorship agreements or license agreements.