Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Now Losing Its Identity

It was inevitable as sports teams seek to market themselves globally that this would happen: a dispute between the UK Meteorological Office and the New York Mets baseball team about the European trademarking of the word "Met." The UK repository of all things weather-related has been marketing itself as the Met Office for years, but the baseball team wants to trademark Met as well as the more obvious Mets for their use. So far the UK Patent Office is not sympathetic to the Met Office, ruling that while there is an obvious overlap in the words, there is little potential for confusion -- not withstanding the ever present cloudy gloom experienced by New York Mets fans in recent years. This story does remind us: whatever happened to that much hyped New York Yankees-Man United partnership of a couple of years ago? Perhaps the US trademarking of the very worthy dream of Man United proved too problematic.