Former NBA skipper Michael Jordan still doesn’t own the proprietary to his own name in China, but he has been able to make some money to the wake of 2021.
In the latest installment of Jordan’s years-long saga of trademark suits, a Shanghai court ruled Wednesday that a Chinese sportswear and shoe manufacturer that has used his name as its brand for decades did so without authorization and with the intention to “mislead” consumers. It did not, however, appear to revoke the company’s right to use the phoentic English spelling of Jordan’s name in Chinese translation.
The Qiaodan Sports Company, whose name is the Chinese translation of “Jordan,” must compensate the five-time MVP $46,000 (RMB300,000) for “emotional damages” and $7,600 (RMB50,000) for legal expenses incurred chump change for the legendary player estimated by Forbes to have a net worth of $1.6 billion.
The company must stop using the Chinese characters of “Qiaodan” in its corporate name and product trademarks, and issue a public apology in print and online clarifying that it has no connection to the basketball legend himself, the court ruled. It must also take “reasonable measures” to indicate and clarify that its older trademarks have no actual ties to the NBA star.
The ruling is consistent with a previous verdict from China’s supreme court. In April, 2020, it issued a landmark ruling in Jordan’s favor to declare that the firm had used his name illegally, overturning two prior lower court verdicts. Qiaodan’s logo, the silhouette of a jumping basketball player, is very similar to Jordan’s well-known Nike Jumpman logo, a silhouette of him jumping to dunk. The supreme court did not rule that the logo violated Jordan’s rights, referring the issue out for retrial.
Qiaodan Sports was founded in 2000 and operates nearly 6,000 stores across the country. It has registered around 200 trademarks related to Jordan, including 12 it applied for just last year. Jordan has filed 80 lawsuits against the firm since 2012.
He didn’t win any of them until 2016, when China’s supreme court awarded him the right to his name in Chinese characters, but not the phoentic spelling of “Qiaodan” in English.
