The headlines in the news are about FIFA's Sepp Blatter who is now in partnership with the owners of the Ballon D'Or. We have been in a legal dispute with the owners of the Ballon D'Or for nearly 4 years over our business Golden Balls Ltd and our trade mark Golden Balls which we have had since 2001.
Intra Presse, who own the Ballon D'Or award originally told us to stop trading, hand over our domain name www.goldenballs.tv and all our trade mark registrations as they believed we started our company because of them. We had never heard of them before, their award has always been known in the UK as The European Footballer of the Year Award. They opposed our new European trade mark applications, even though we have had some in Europe since 2002. We actually won at OHIM, they appealed and now it will all be decided in the European Courts of Justice. We told them we have nothing to do with a football award and there are many other Golden Ball Awards and the biggest one was the FIFA/Adidas Golden Ball Award, why don't they stop them? Instead of trying to stop them, this year they went into partnership with FIFA and their award is now called the FIFA Ballon D'Or. You can see our videos on Youtube which explain what has gone on at Ballon D'Or v Golden Balls. Thanks to a very kind QC who has offered to help us, we can now fight this in the European Courts and hope that we can soon move on and carry on running our business.
I will keep updating this blog to let you know what is happening.
Thanks for reading,
Mrs Golden Balls.
