Basseterre, St. Kitts, August 20, 2021 (SKNIS): The Intellectual Property Office of St. Kitts and Nevis (IPOSKN) is partnering with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to host a webinar on the topic ‘Leveraging Intellectual Property in the Sports Arena.
“We will be looking at sports and IP, like the why and the how. Why is it important for us to even think about sports and IP? We will be thinking about athletes as brand ambassadors – what are the issues associated with that and how do we commercialize the fact that we may use our athletes as Digicel or flow brand ambassadors or whatever the business venture,” said Jihan Williams, Registrar – IPOSKN, on the August 18 edition of Working for You.
Ms. Williams said that the webinar will also touch on the name, face value and image rights of the athletes.
“When you think about all those FIFA games and these video games and you see the players, these players had to sign off to be included in these video games because you can’t just take somebody’s image and include it into a commercial… like a video game. The mere fact that you put your face in it, it has value,” she said. “The law is different in some respects depending on the territory that you’re in so we are going to look at it from a St. Kitts and Nevis perspective. We don’t want people to be walking around thinking or wondering what happens here because a lot of time our exposure with these issues is based on the US, UK or Canada, but we really want to bring these issues home for our own people.” Ms. Williams added.
The webinar, which will be held on August 24and 25 from 9:00 a.m. to 12 noon daily, will cover several other topics including sports marketing, sponsorship and IP; branding for athletes and national teams; sports tourism and country branding, as well as broadcasting, media rights and live streaming.
“… so that people can get a full appreciation of what happens off the court to ensure that something happens in the court and all the contracts and negotiations that have to go intoit. We have to understand what’s happening so that we ourselves here in St. Kitts and Nevis and the region can begin to leverage our own Intellectual Property,” said the registrar.
