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[The Palmist]

Morning Chaps,

Forgive my naivety, I have been wondering for a while if there is a law which governs copying bat profiles or is anyone is free to copy anything. There are so many reputable bat makers who offer to copy a favourite bat or base their own profiles on previously used shapes.

The same goes for softs, bags etc. a lot of them look exactly the same with different branding. Is cricket industry free from copyright laws, patents etc.

[Manormanic]

No, but you would have to evidence intellectual property existed in the first place.  Thats pretty hard to do for all but the most unique shapes...

[tim2000s]

Copyright/design right apply however you look at it, however, when it comes to cricket bats you run into whether the design owned by an entity. Who owns the intellectual property?

For example, GN were able to patent the scooping on their GN100, Twin Scoop and GN500 as the first people to apply this to a cricket bat and Slazenger had to come up with a way around it when they made their V800, the first model of which had the "eyes" and had to be modified to be the second with the edge grooves.

One could reasonably argue that given that just about every other shape out there is a variation on the shape of a traditional cricket bat (with maybe the exception of the MMi3) which could be considered to be prior art, there is no real design right available to the "cricket bat shape".

With that in mind, you could reasonably get a bat maker to make you a new bat in a favourite shape, that was branded as one of their bats.

If, however, you were to make direct copies including branding and try to pass them off as originals, then you would be committing some form of deception, and this would be illegal.