HARD ROCK
A fake Hard Rock Cafe in Zagreb
Te company faces challenges common to lots of brands, but almost uniquely, it has had to chase down infringers from the second it decided to expand. Since the brand’s launch, the company has been owned by different people and, at times, the rights to the Hard Rock Cafe brand have even been utilised or controlled by different entities in different countries. All this means that Hard Rock had to learn the hard way what brand protection entails—lessons that have since paid off in spades.
One of the biggest issues—international imitation or effective theſt of the concept—is a legacy of that initial unpreparedness for international expansion and lack of proper protection of the Hard Rock marks on an international level.
“Some of the issues we’ve found in terms of actual pirate establishments—a lot pre-dates my time with the company—stem back to the 70s when the UK was our first location and there were copycats with an opportunistic attitude, who took the brand to other countries prior to our brand thinking of going international,” Roby says. “So we have had some challenges in terms of dealing with jurisdictions where we hadn’t even registered our trademarks yet or even necessarily foreseen that it was going to go global at that time. We had issues in Canada and Germany. We will start with legal proceedings to add pressure, but sometimes it has ended up being a business solution in the end. Tat said, where the law allows us to rely on the worldwide fame of our Hard Rock trademarks or copyright rights in the famous Hard Rock logo, then we will rely on the courts to do the job for us, which has worked well for us in such countries as Bolivia, Croatia and Greece.
“In terms of our bigger problems these days— newer pirate locations that pop up occasionally —I think that aſter the company learnt from some previous difficult situations, it did work on
expanding its international portfolio and so we do have our registered rights in the jurisdictions that we care about, even if we aren’t actually present there yet. Te expanded portfolio combined with the brand being famous or well-known on an international level has enabled us to take a more active and aggressive role in policing the brand in more recent years, which in turn has allowed us to deal with newer pirates much more easily.”
Collectable brand
While the restaurants are still probably the best known of Hard Rock’s assets, anyone who has eaten in one will know that the associated merchandise is at least as significant. Branded t-shirts and pins in particular provide lucrative revenue streams, and the problems posed to the company’s IP attorneys in these markets are very different from competitive restaurants and require different strategies.
“Te unique thing about our merchandise—what a lot of people don’t realise—is that authentic Hard Rock merchandise can only be purchased inside Hard Rock establishments or online at
hardrock.com. So, if you find merchandise in a different hotel or in just a little shop on a street, that’s not going to be authorised, that’s not going to be us,” Roby says.
“Tere’s no question [that if you see Hard Rock merchandise for sale in a street market], that will be completely unauthorised. One thing we take pride in—in the brand being so collectable and unique—is that really the only way you can access it, particularly ones that include the city drop, you know the classic logo t-shirts that say ‘London’ underneath, is only if you went to the cafe and visited the Rock Shop to purchase the item. We do have our own retail shop online on our website, but there you cannot buy city-specific items; the only way you can get a city-specific item is by visiting a Hard Rock establishment.”
22 World Intellectual Property Review May/June 2010
Destroying counterfeit products
But if Hard Rock sells merchandise online, so can others, and this presents its own problems.
Roby says: “We do enforcement there too, we use the Vero electronic monitoring tool provided by eBay and we manage that in-house. With eBay, it’s a little bit of a finer line because what we see more of there is the resale of legitimate items, particularly in the soſt merchandise category. Because of the collectability of the Hard Rock’s brand itself, one of our key merchandise areas really is with our pins, just like fans of Disney collecting and trading their pins. Our pins are very unique and very popular in the collectability and trading market, so we do a lot of work monitoring the pins on eBay because we do see instances of counterfeit pins coming out of China. So eBay is a good tool for us to track down and become aware of some counterfeit problems—usually, we learn about them first on eBay and then we work to get back to the source in China.”
She continues: “Oſtentimes, we’ll do test purchases because the technology behind how our pins are manufactured and how you tell whether or not they’re legitimate is very sophisticated. You can’t necessarily tell sometimes just by seeing the pictures on eBay, because ones that are counterfeited will look exactly like a design that we maybe did sell in the Hard Rock Cafe Barcelona, for example. More oſten than not, the fake pin is not going to be so readily apparent. It’s not going to be a design that was never designed by us but what will be different is in how the pin is manufactured, which oſten is only visible to a trained eye upon close physical inspection. You sometimes can’t even tell that from eBay or eBay won’t have a picture of the back side, and so what will tip us off sometimes is if we see 50 of the same pin being sold and we know it was a limited edition, so such high numbers on eBay are not possible.
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