No Pink Grip for You! (maybe… someday)
Over the past year and a half I have covered the attempted IP grabs at white crowns, matching crowns/shafts/grips, and colors in general related to golf club design. Most recently I covered a Cobra Golf design patent in the post titled “Will White Club Heads Still Be Around in 5 Years?”
In that post I touched on the trademark wrangling of Cobra and TaylorMade in their quest to own white via the trademark process and the design patent process. A Cobra trademark application has matured to registration on the Supplemental Register, see registration here, while the TaylorMade application remains pending. You can refresh your memory by reading the prior post here. The post also touched upon Cobra’s design patent USPN D652464 and pointed out that while the Cobra trademark application seemed to be directed to “the color white as applied to the entirety of a golf club excepting the collar and face of the golf club head,” i.e. including the sole, their design patent is geared toward only the color of the crown in combination with the color of the shaft and the grip (white or black). White crown, white shaft, white grip = Cobra design patent, but also black crown, black shaft, black grip = Cobra design patent!
Interestingly Cobra has taken it a step further, as revealed in a utility patent application that published last week as US Pub. No. 
Never underestimate the value of intellectual property!
This got me thinking, surely Karsten (aka PING) has attempted to grab some coverage associated with the color pink on club heads, right? Well, not yet.
One reason may be a trademark registration (on the Supplemental Register) owned by Frankly Consulting, the company formed by former USGA Technical Director Frank Thomas. The trademark registration describes the mark as:
The color(s) pink is/are claimed as a feature of the mark. The mark consists of the color pink applied to the head of a golf putter. The broken lines are used to show the position of the mark on the goods and are not part of the mark.
The registration is clearly directed to the Original Pink Frankly Frog Putter. Hindsight being 20/20, I bet Frankly Consulting wishes the description had simply said “golf club head” rather than “golf putter.”
So, hopefully Bubba likes the black grip that he is currently using because if the Cobra application were to issue as a patent, which is a big IF, he may not be able to completely match his golf club’s outfit!
David Dawsey – A Golf IP Attorney
PS – click here to read an old (i.e. probably outdated) post about BubbaGolf.