TRADEMARK FOR ZIDANE'S HEAD-BUTT

Zinedine Zidane (http://www.zidane.fr/homepage.html), a recently retired French soccer player, has been consistently ranked as one of the top soccer players of all time. He announced earlier this spring that he would retire after the 2006 World Cup (http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com/). The French soccer team advanced to the finals eventually losing the final game to Italy. However, while Zidane had a great career, he recently gained much negative attention for his behavior during a recent soccer match (http://www.picciottisoccer.135.it/). In the last match of his career, Zidane head-butted Italian opponent Marco Materazzi in the chest after the two players exchanged words during the 110th minute of the World Cup final game. Allegedly, Materazzi instigated the confrontation by making defamatory comments towards Zidane.

Two days after the World Cup Final, Zhao Xiaokai, a Chinese entrepreneur and general manager of a sport-related company, paid 2,000 YUAN ($250.00 USD) to register the trademark in China of a silhouette of Zidane head-butting Italian defender Marco Materazzi in the chest for shoes, hats and beer products. While some think that the mark is unregisterable because it is another's image and/or likeness, Zhao claims that the silhouette does not involve anyone's image or likeness because the trademark only includes a silhouette of the players.

Currently, Zhao is inviting bids of one million YUAN ($125,400 USD) for the rights to the trademark. Two beer companies have reportedly contacted Zhao in an attempt to buy rights to the mark. Time will tell if Zhao actually profits from his trademark filing.

Game Over: Microsoft and Nintendo are Sued for Controller Designs

On July 31, 2006, Texas-based Anascape brought a patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and Nintendo in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. The lawsuit alleges the defendants' infringement of twelve patents which were issued to Anascape between 1999 and 2005. The patents have titles like "3D controller with vibration" (U.S. Patent No. 6,906,700) and "Remote controller with analog buttons" (U.S. Patent No. 6,208,271) and cover many basic technologies used by modern video game controllers.

The present lawsuit does not name Sony, whose Playstation was the first console to employ controllers that used force feedback. In 2002, Sony and Microsoft were sued by Immersion Corp. for infringing U.S. Patent Nos. 6,424,333 and 6,275,213, both titled "Tactile feedback man-machine interface device." Microsoft settled out of court, while Sony unsuccessfully asserted that their technology was contained in a patent licensed from Logitech in 1998. Immersion was awarded $91 million in retroactive royalties and a permanent injunction against Sony selling controllers with force feedback. The permanent injunction was stayed pending the outcome of Sony's appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, but Sony does not plan to offer force feedback controllers with its upcoming Playstation 3 console.