By C. Bradford Jorgensen
ABSTRACT:
For those who enjoy the game of golf, whether you are brand new to the game or have been playing for years, the contents of this article will peak your curiosity and open your eyes. While the article does focus on intellectual property law and the obstacles that golf club manufactures face in the ever-changing world market, there is none of the traditional “legalese†normally found in most law articles. Instead, Mr. Jorgensen’s article is one that could easily be found in Sports Illustrated while providing a brief history of the sport and describing the evolution of the process for manufacturing golf clubs.
Mr. Jorgensen’s article also arms the reader with the knowledge to be able to walk into any sporting goods store and immediately differentiate between brand name clubs, legal look a-like imitations, and illegal knockoffs. Such knowledge is critical because being able to distinguish between legal and illegal clubs so as not to purchase the illegal knockoffs protects the integrity of the game, and lowers the cost of the brand name clubs over the long term. Not purchasing illegal knockoffs will eventually make them less profitable for the counterfeiting companies that make them and legal manufacturers will be able to spend less money in litigation fighting counterfeiters, passing those savings on to consumers. Regardless of the intricacies of the market economics of golf clubs, at the very least, the next time you walk through a sporting goods store or watch Tiger Woods hit a 300+ yard drive on television, you won’t be able to stop yourself from looking at the clubs being used and trying to remember where in Brad Jorgensen’s article those clubs were mentioned (and whether those clubs are legal).
CITE AS:
C. Bradford Jorgensen, Note, Golf Club Technology: Intellectual Property and the Counterfeiting Epidemic, 13 SYRACUSE SCI. & TECH. L. REP. 58 (2006).
NOTE: Footnotes in this abstract were omitted.