What, exactly, is Gymkhana? In most countries, it’s similar to “autotesting”, which is a British equivalent to autocross. Think lower speeds and more emphasis on stunt-like stuff: stop in a marked box and reverse out, handbrake turn around a cone, that sort of thing. Those of you who read Japanese can find out more about Japanese gymkhana here.
An organization called Gymkhana GRID came up with a fascinating idea: have two cars competing head-to-head on a mirror-image course. This isn’t a perfectly original idea. The SCCA has had ProSolo events for a very long time, running two cars from a drag tree through mirrored courses. This video starts slowly but will give you a pretty good idea of how it works. As far as I can tell, GymkhanaGRID was meant to be a combination of the ProSolo idea and donuts around trash cans. They’ve even run an event or two, one of which featured a “throwdown” between Ken Block and Tanner Foust in kind of an Ultimate Battle Of Self-Promoting Thirtysomething Backmarkers.
This year, however, Gymkhana Grid has been forced to cancel its event due to trademark ownership and licensing issues. It would appear that someone already owns the idea of “gymkhana”, and it isn’t the SCCA.
According to the promoters,
We have been informed that we can no longer use the word “Gymkhana” for an at profit business with out licensing the word “Gymkhana” It turns out that a certain company has trademarked the word “Gymkhana” for all motorsport activities, including the class of goods and services covering recreational events and activities relating to motorsports as stated in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office registered trademark serial number 85249801. Basically that means you need to pay a license fee if your allowed to even use the word “Gymkhana” in relation to your activity if it is a business for profit. If this corporation knew what it took to put on a grass roots motorsport event they would understand that unless it gains huge support, there is not much profit to be made and that sometimes, people put on these events simply for the LOVE of the sport. ALL of us at Gymkhana GRID love the sport and the potential in the sport. However, we do not have the financial means to continue on this licensing path of greed over a single word!
Ooh! Let’s go take a look at that serial number.
On Wednesday, February 23, 2011, a U.S. federal trademark registration was filed for GYMKHANA by DC Shoes, Inc., Huntington Beach, CA 92649. The USPTO has given the GYMKHANA trademark serial number of 85249801. The current federal status of this trademark filing is NON-FINAL ACTION – MAILED. The correspondent listed for GYMKHANA is MITCH MILSTEIN of QUIKSILVER, INC., 15202 GRAHAM STREET, TRADEMARKS/LEGAL DEPT. HUNTINGTON BEACH, CA 92649 . The GYMKHANA trademark is filed in the category of Computer & Software Products & Electrical & Scientific Products , Education and Entertainment Services . The description provided to the USPTO for GYMKHANA is Amusement apparatus and games adapted for use with television receivers or with video or computer monitors; Recorded and pre-recorded materials, namely, CDs, CD-ROMs, and DVDs, all featuring sports and recreational activities in the nature of motorsports racing and exhibitions, surfing, snowboarding, skateboarding, street sports and music; apparatus for recording, transmission or reproduction of sound or images; magnetic data carriers, downloadable files of sounds and/or images, in particular mu.
I don’t think “mu” there has anything to do with friction, it’s just where the available excerpt ends. So, just to reiterate:
- Gymkahana is a well-known global description of a motorsport.
- A company held American “gymkhana” events last year.
- DC Shoes, formerly owned by Ken Block and now affiliated with him, registered the name this year.
- And they feel their legal position is secure enough to threaten the company which ran the event last year to fold.
The hell with occupying Wall Street. Somebody occupy the Patent Office. To be fair, the final decision hasn’t yet been handed down on this rather, shall we say, speculative application, but in the meantime DC Shoes is free to use its legal might to clamp down on anyone who might potentially infringe.
My suggestion for a resolution: The SCCA can keep the real motorsports, these GRID people can keep the pretend motorsports, and DC Shoes, along with Ken Block, can stick to the business of pay-crashing in rally events and making garbage shoes in China and Vietnam.
I don’t understand the righteous rage here.
Whether you like him or not, Ken Block is the guy who turned Gymkhana into a household name (at least among us motorsports enthusiasts.) I’m actually surprised it took him that long to trademark the name.
Yeah, it sucks for the guy who ran the Gymkhana GRID event. But on the same token, trademarks are one of those things that you have to vigorously defend. If you don’t defend the trademark in even a single case, the courts could decide you’ve abandoned the trademark.
If the name of the event was so important to the promoter, he should have got his shit together and trademarked Gymkhana before DC Shoes. He obviously had ample time as the event was last year, and the title was not trademarked until earlier this year.
The trouble is that I was reading about gymkhanas organized by local and national car clubs in books written about the American sports car scene in the ’50s and ’60s. Trademarking gymkhana is as retarded as trademarking douchebag.
Do you think the NBA should have a trademark on the term “Basketball” and sue local rece centers for setting up “basketball” courts without paying license fees? How about football? Baseball?
“Gymkhana” is a name for a sport/activity that has existed for YEARS; no one should be able to trademark it. Now, if you wanted to set up a “National Gymkhana Association”, you could trademark THAT, your NGA logo, and associated marketing material. But “Gymkhana” itself, no.
On the other hand, the fact that you *shouldn’t* be able to doesn’t mean you *can’t*, in the USA’s totally broken legal system. See: Runza! The Runza is a food item that has existed since the 1800s, and was spread to the USA by German immigrants – it is primarily found in the midwest. But then along came the Runza fast-food restaurant, which was somehow allowed to trademark the term “Runza”, despite the fact that it’s existed for over a hundred years. One came to my hometown, and promptly sued two local bakeries out of existance for daring to sell runzas. WFT???? It’s like if McDonalds tried to trademark the term “Hamburger”. But Runza managed to do it, and it appears that now someone else has managed to do it with “Gymkhana”.
The half a dozen times that I’ve met Ken Block at rally races he’s actually been pretty cool.
He’s a better promoter than he is a driver though. Sometimes you step on a lot of toes protecting a really dumb trademarked name.
Well I wasn’t entirely sure before, but this post provides convincing evidence that Ken Block is a Douchebag. So a part of the solution is to ensure that any future products or services I buy do not benefit this moron.
Thanks, Jack
Who’s Ken Block?
Wasn’t Tanner Foust a Ford spokes-tool?
I’ll be more interested in drift (and its cousins) when full-size, unnaturally aspirated pick-ups are given regular billing.
Somebody reach into the fridge and grab me an Avalon.
It sounds like this is DC Shoes and their lawyers initiating this, not Ken Block (he does seem a bit douchey in interviews, but I’ll defer to those who have actually met him).
It doesn’t look like they want to shut down the Gymkhana GRID series – they just want them to change the name so that it doesn’t include the term ‘Gymkhana’.
Rightly or wrongly Ken Block has branded his antics under the Gymkhana name. Failing to defend a trademark or patent can mean losing it. It seems that DC Shoes may be planning on releasing a ‘racing’ game based on Block’s Gymkhana antics (which actually sounds pretty cool) or maybe they’re planning on selling DVDs or something. In either event if they don’t establish and defend the trademark some Chinese production company could step in and start selling Gymkhana branded merchandise, games, DVDs, or whatever, profiting from the work that Block has done, but not sharing those profits, and damaging the brand through their knock-offs at the same time.
If Gymkhana was actually a thing before Ken Block popularized it, perhaps a prior-art claim could be made to invalidate the DC Shoes trademark. Otherwise, while this does seem to be a dick move on one level, it’s probably a necessary one if DC Shoes wants to move forward with additional Gymkhana products.
Not that it makes things any better, but registered trademarks have nothing to do with the date of filing. A person or organization simply has to prove that they have a history and vested interest with a name or phrase. If DC Shoes was the first to start publicizing or using “Gymkhana” in the US, they also have the right to trademark it. I have no idea if that’s true or not, but if there’s abundant proof that the word was in regular usage in the US before and during the time DC Shoes used it, you can contest the trademark fairly easily, or better yet, the company who brought it into usage first can claim primacy and trademark rights.
That said, it’s an asshole move for a word that was (presumably) moving into the American car-enthusiast lexicon.
The threat of legal action (and the expense of it, even for a sure win) can be enough to affect Gymkhana GRID, which probably doesn’t have a lot to spend on lawyers. It sounds kind of flakey to trademark the name and I’ll be surprised if it is accepted, but it is a textbook example of how to use the legal system in some depressingly unintended ways.
As for Ken Block’s personal involvement, he doesn’t own DC Shoes so much, and as a public face of the company it’s probably a lot easier to smile and shut up than get into a fight with corporate, no matter what his personal opinion is. Blame him for that all you want, but when money is in play anyone can become a lot less human than they otherwise would be. Outside of those situations, in my case at end of rally events, I’ve thought Ken was a much nicer guy the Travis Pastrana, though either of their co-drivers are more interesting to talk with.
What do you have against Tanner Foust anyway? I have never met him, however he seems like a nice enough guy.
I agree that his driving resume is really thin. He sure is brave though, as I am sure you saw that Hot Wheels jump he did earlier this year.
He did seem able to keep up with Paul Tracy in the totally informal races they did in sportscars on that show they were on together.
I don’t know why Jack has a problem with Tanner either. Tanner is a really tidy driver in rally and show-offy drifting stuff too. I’ve met and talked to Tanner just as many times as Block and he was a totally down to earth normal, nice guy.
I think Jack’s angst is a bit misguided.
Old men posing as extreme athletes on television when top-notch cyclists and auto racers can’t find a dollar’s worth of sponsorship. That’s my issue in a nutshell.
Tanner Foust is the modern equivalent to Steve McQueen, and that doesn’t say much about modern times :)
You must hate 90+% of professional drivers if that is your defense for a bash on Tanner. Money puts drivers in cars and you know this. Young guys with talent will never get a shot without money or connections to money. Hell, most of the F1 grid is made up of pay drivers.
Why bash a decent guy for being successful at playing the game? If anything I think Tanner should be commended since he didn’t grow up in a rich family throwing tens of thousands of dollars at making him a professional racer.
All of these points would be valid if Tanner did any racing.
Jack, Tanner has done quite well at rallycross racing in the US and Europe. I guess if that isn’t racing and stage rally isn’t racing, then I don’t know what racing is.
Chill the hell out man. Geez.
“All of these points would be valid if Tanner did any racing.”
Wow, you don’t sound bitter at all.
I know absolutely nothing about Tanner, but as someone who raced dirtbikes back in that era, Steve McQueen was a dammed good off-road rider.
Jack does have a point. I’ve run in some extremely challenging rallies. It’s not the same as racing against another vehicle on the same track, circuit, stage, what-have-you at the same time.
It’s splitting a very fine hair, but strictly speaking, in rallying, you’re not racing against other competitors. You’re racing against their times.
Sure there are auto racers who can’t get sponsorship… like Paul Tracy for example. What top-notch cyclists can’t get sponsorship? Floyd Landis? I feel bad for him, he basically lost everything.
However, I don’t see how Tanner Foust is in any way responsible for other people not being able to get sponsorship. Maybe the other people need to be more marketable and then they would get sponsorship.
I would suggest that without manufactured “races” like X-Games Rally et al, more people might be interested in legitimate racing.
Do you think Block and Foust are better, harder-working drivers than anybody in the top twenty positions of the SKUSA Championship Senior classes? If not, then why are they all over television and the Internet while the guys who are winning in Formula Atlantic, Indy Lights, and Conti ST are complete unknowns?
Dude, Landis can’t get sponsorship because he’s a convicted and self-admitted doper. Cheaters like him shouldn’t ever receive sponsorship money again. Another good example is the HTC Highroad pro road team, based in USA. They have been the winningest road team in the world for 3 years, but had to disband because they couldn’t come up with enough sponsorship $$ for 2012. Baseball players make $30mil a year, and a top pro cycling team’s entire budget is less than that. Makes a lot of sense, huh?
Plenty of people following US stage rally make the same arguments about XGames and the like, while others say it helps generate publicity for what is otherwise a pretty unknown series. Tanner and Ken aren’t too bad on normal stage events in North America, either.
I can see arguments on both sides, but short of people dying is there such a thing as bad publicity?
I agree with you that Tanner Foust doesn’t work any harder than any of the top drivers in the other series you mentioned.
Although I don’t think the sponsorship dollars that go into the X-Games Rally competition would otherwise find its way into other less popular forms of racing. The viewership is simply too low. The companies that have enough money to sponsor everybody, like Monster and Red Bull, sponsor everyone from the local level to the Formula 1 level.
Either way I don’t see how Tanner Foust is at fault for that. Nothing is really stopping the drivers from Formula Atlantic or similar series from trying to get an X-Games Rally ride either. The extra exposure might help them get sponsorship for their other racing efforts.
I think real racing only appeals to a limited part of the population. The X-Games Rally type stuff has broader appeal since it has all the spectacular stuff like cars flying through the air. Plus the races don’t last long enough for people to get bored.
The X-Games Rally competition isn’t completely without merit. I remember 2 or 3 years ago when Kenny Brack returned to racing in the X-Games Rally competition, and he barely beat Tanner Foust for the overall win.
The DC legal team would appear to be doing nothing more than trying to profiteer from the unexpected success of Ken’s slide cars around Segways videos.
The opening of the original “gymkhana practice” video includes a “dictionary definition” of gymkhana, and says that Ken wanted to take the original concept “further and on a larger scale”.
The correct outcome of this seems obvious.
As a British person, I love the expression ‘Douchebag.’
We have loads of Americanisms creeping in, but this one hasn’t quite reached everyday levels of use.
I like it, am gonna use it more often.
Our equivalent is probably calling someone a ‘prat’, or a ‘berk’ (which has much more offensive origins.)
Errm, as you were.
Only if we can start using “berk” http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/berk
Creative, catchy title to this article. Legally-clean too.
I certainly hope that Gymkhana GRID didn’t pay money for the advice that they got. Did they talk to an actual lawyer that knows about copyrights? Did they bother to browse the USPTO website?
Here’s a hint:
After less than ten minutes on the USPTO website, I downloaded a PDF copy of a letter that the USPTO sent to DC Shoes informing them that their trademark application was rejected. May I include a quote proving that government workers are not retarded? This is TTAC after all.
“Registration is refused because the applied-for mark merely describes a feature of applicant’s goods and/or services – namely, the content and subject matter of applicant’s goods and services. Trademark Act Section 2(e)(1), 15 U.S.C. §1052(e)(1); see TMEP §§1209.01(b), 1209.03 et seq.
Here, the applied-for mark is GYMKHANA for a variety of goods in Class 009 featuring, related to, or broad enough to potentially feature or relate to sports and recreational activities, including the sporting activity of GYMKHANA.
The wording GYMKHANA means or refers to a form of motorsport similar to autocross. See attached definitions, webpages on the sport, and Wikipedia article. The below listed goods and services all feature sports, recreational, and cultural activities broadly or directly relating to motorsports and other street sports. Moreover, what appears to be applicant’s website uses the term “gymkhana” to refer descriptively or generically to the sporting activity. See attached screen shots of applicant’s website. Thus, the wording GYMKHANA describes the featured aspect of these games, recorded materials, downloadable files, sports services, and subject matter of the various published and produced media.”
The damn PDF is 62 pages long and specifically mentions Gymkhana GRID as a reason for rejecting the trademark application. The Patent Office did their job. Quite well, in fact.
Kick ass, thanks for looking through this… but why is the application listed as incomplete at the moment? any idea?
It’s never final until the applicant gives up or is successful. What is probably most likely is that DC Shoes will narrow the scope of their trademark until the USPTO accepts it.
Dude: Trademark, not copyright.
It is possible for a person or company to use something from the public domain and through its use in commerce establish “secondary meaning”. An example of this would be the Grateful Dead’s “skull & roses” graphic. I interviewed Stanley Mouse, who with Alton Kelly took that image from a 19th century edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The image was in the public domain, it’s not any more.
Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Newman character is another example.
So it’s conceivable that Ken Block, could, over time, establish some secondary meaning to “gymkhana”, but remember that the Dead and Mad didn’t have anyone challenging their exclusive use, like Block/DC does.
In the end, whoever used it first wins.
Except if it’s deemed generic (this seems where the USPTO was going in their refusal in that class). Then it’s a free-for-all.
Ken Block should register it in China. There, whoever registers first wins. But I bet tomorrow, which is the first working day after the holidays (yes, it’s a Saturday, and they will work on Sunday as well) the Chinese Trademark Office will be flooded with GYMKHANA registrations.
Gymkhana.com was registered in 2002 by Madmedia.
I always get this confused with the 80s movie “Gymkata”.
Now this post should read: If You Didn’t Think Jack Baruth Was A Jealous Douchebag before, This Post Will Change Your Mind.
Believe me when I tell you that I wouldn’t bother to do “Gymkhana” if somebody paid me to do it. So I’m not super jealous of people who have spent millions to do it.
The only person I’m jealous of right now is Ryan Eversley. And pretty much anybody running second seat in Daytona Prototypes. I don’t bother to conceal this jealousy.
Don’t then. Hell, I’d do it for free if somebody gave me a car to hoon around in circles and barrel around things. I’d be terrible at it compared to some of the guys out there who are actually good at this non-racing hype fest.
Still, it sounds like fun to me, but you’re obviously above that.
this thread should be dedicated to all the videos of Ken Block crashing in the WRC events, flipping the car, and a summary of his finishes at those events. Driving a WRX through an empty warehouse is one thing, doing it as a top competitor is apparently something very different.
These guys are to Racing what Katarina Witt was to speed-skating. That doesn’t mean they aren’t talented figure-drivers, but I agree that they don’t really race.
More on-topic with the vid, as someone who just witnessed an old Focus WRC car get demolished, and an RS200 almost crashing at a local hillclimb event last weekend I must say, that is not a real crash…
Did any of you go to the Gymkhana Grid Ken Block invitational at Irwindale that this guy put on? I did, and it sucked. Not because of the driving- it’s was fun to watch guys from very different backgrounds compete in a gymkhana styled race. The part that sucked was how crappy it was ran. Huge delays, weird set up, etc.
Autoblog shed some additional light on this, with quotes from both sides:
http://www.autoblog.com/2011/10/04/dc-shoes-aiming-to-shut-down-gymkhana-grid-events-for-trademark/
Does it suck to see the little guy being picked on? Sure. Does it suck worse to see the little guy bastardize the name of something Ken Block & DC worked hard and spent $$$ to build? I think so-
The problem is, as pointed out, Gymkhana as a description of motorsport, has been in use since the 50s and is in active use in Japan and Europe at both an amateur and a professional level.
Any attempt to prevent people from using it to describe their motorsports events is like trying to copyright the words “drift”, “drag” and “grand prix”… Which is why DC Shoes’ attempt at copyrighting the term has been unsuccessful.
Their lawyers are idiots. What next… Copyright the term “shoes”?
Block just got 8th place at the Rally de France. I know rallying isn’t racing, but it’s still pretty good for a douchebag.
http://www.crash.net/world+rally/results/173622/1/rallye_de_france_wrc_result_-_revised.html
8th place, in this case, is third from last in class, and it was his best finish of the event.