MELBOURNE CUP IMAGE TRADEMARK FORCES SUBTLE CHANGE OF COLOURS

By Graham Potter | Thursday, September 16, 2010

Codename, a lightly raced three-year-old, hardly set the track alight when he finished in a well beaten sixth place in only his second career start at Eagle Farm yesterday, but the gelding did claim a minor place in the racing history of the Morton family, whose high profile silks of black, gold cup, striped sleeves and quartered cap have graced a multitude of racetracks throughout Australia and around the world since being registered eight years ago.

The story about Codename’s limited claim to fame directly revolves around those Morton racing silks.

While the description of the silks remains the same in the race-book as that used in the past, the silks have undergone a subtle change and Codename was the first runner to carry the altered colours.

It is hardly a ‘new look’ and even the most regular of punters would have been hard-pressed to pick up the change at first glance, but it was a change forced on the Morton family by racing authorities in Victoria and that is why it is the story behind the story that makes such interesting reading.

Glenn Morton takes up the tale:

“We were at Royal Ascot with Gold Trail. I think it was three days before he was due to start. We got an e-mail … through Racing Queensland … from the VRC (Victorian Racing Club) claiming that we were in breach of the Trademark Act and that we must cease using our colours immediately because they claimed it infringed on their Melbourne Cup trademark.

“They thought our silks were deceptively similar to the Melbourne Cup image, registered under trademark, which happened to be registered AFTER we’d had registered our colours, by the way.

Their trademark wasn’t actually registered until about 2007. Our colours were registered in, I think, 2002.

“Apparently it was Gold Trail’s international profile that brought it to their attention … when he came fourth in Singapore at Kranji.

“My understanding is that apparantly one of the VRC committee men was in Singapore and the bloke next to him turned to him and said, oh look at those colours, they’ve got the Melbourne Cup on the back … and that’s when it must have dawned on him and they decided to take action to stop us using them.

“First of all we ran around trying to find a silk-maker over there (in England) to see if we could slightly modify them because they weren’t going to let us use them at Royal Ascot, but we eventually negotiated with the VRC directly and they gave us permission to keep using them.

“First of all we explained that they were registered through Queensland Racing in, as I say, I think it was 2002. We’d probably had a hundred runners and won fifty or sixty races with them, even in Victoria.

“Yeah, so eventually, through negotiation, we left it that they would give us three choices of cup to choose from … to change it. We ended up negotiating that they contributed to the costs of the replacement of the silks. Then we got ten new sets of colours made. We had to spread them around between five or six different trainers.

“The time-frame was that we get it done as soon as possible. We just received them last week, so that is how it came about that Codename is the first runner to go out in the new Glenn and Lisa Morton colours.

“Hopefully they will be as lucky for us as the old ones were in the past.”

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