The Study of the Control of Ambush Marketing－under Trademark Law and Unfair Competition Law

Holding an event usually takes the event organizer a great deal of money. Companies as official sponsors relieve the financial stress of the event organizer and pay sponsorship fees to support the event. The official sponsor expects a return on its investment. The event organizer makes a number of promises to the sponsor, consisting among others in warranting advertising space, certain privileges and some level of exclusivity. The other companies, who don’t become the official sponsor, take a new marketing strategy to compete with the official sponsor. This is commonly referred to as ambush marketing, which is a new and developing marketing strategy. Ambush marketing is commercial activities which seek to associatiate their companies with the event without authorization from the event organizer. Without payment of the requisite sponsorship fees the ambush marketing companies are likely to achieve the goal that official sponsors have expected. Therefore, ambush marketing has impact on the economic interests of the official sponsor and the event organizer.

This thesis focuses on legal analysis on ambush marketing and the study of the conflict and the balance of interests between two sides, one side ambush marketing companies as well as the other side the event organizer and the official sponsor. First of all, the concerned law is trademark law. The legal action under trademark law the event organizer may take is to register event mark and then according to the right claim trademark tort. The event organizer attempts to take leagal measures against ambush marketing in order to protect interests of the official sponsor. Furthermore, unfair competition law and civil law also provide them protection. At Olympic Games the event organizer even demands more protective special legislation. However, the law above mentioned has its own limits. We can observe the protection of economic interests of the event organizer and the official sponsor isn’t so absolute. We can not ignore that based on the feature of events and freedom of commercial speech ambush marketing has its legal position under law. As for recent events which are held by Taiwan, we neither pay much attention to the issue nor consider the conflict and the balance of interests between two sides. In this thesis, the author tries to point out the recently developing issue and bring up some suggestions.