Formula One Lost Trademark Protection Over Its Own Clothing Line. The Losses Never Stopped.

The IP Runway: Issue No. 10

Intellectual property insights for the global business of fashion.

When “Use It or Lose It” Meets a Billion-Dollar Merchandise Empire

Edition ten is proof that trademark law doesn’t care how famous your brand is, it only cares whether you can prove you actually used it.

For nearly three decades, a single German man has been quietly dismantling Formula One’s trademark portfolio, one revocation application at a time. He just won again, four weeks ago.

The case, fast

Dieter Hang’s dispute with Formula One Licensing B.V. traces back to 1998, when F1 first objected to his own use and registration of “Formula 1” variations in Germany. After losing a cancellation fight F1 brought against him in 2015, Hang went on the offensive, filing revocation applications against F1’s own European Union trademarks under a genuinely underused legal doctrine: revocation for non-use.

Under EU trademark law, a registration can be cancelled if its owner hasn’t put the mark to genuine commercial use for five consecutive years, across whichever goods and services it actually covers. Fame or size doesn’t matter to this rule. Fashion houses, sports leagues, and Fortune 500 companies all face the exact same evidentiary bar as anyone else.

Hang filed 10 such applications in 2015, then 60 more in 2018, and 2 further ones in 2019, 69 total. In 2018, the EUIPO’s Cancellation Division stripped F1’s figurative trademark down to almost nothing, leaving protection only for “commemorative coins,” after finding no evidence of genuine use across other categories, including Class 25, the international goods class covering clothing, footwear, and headgear, the exact category behind F1’s licensed team jackets, caps, and race-day merchandise, the same apparel line sold today through the official F1 store and team-branded fashion lines.

F1 fought back, arguing before the EUIPO’s Board of Appeal that Hang’s campaign amounted to an abuse of legal process rather than a genuine trademark dispute. That argument didn’t stop the losses.

A billion-dollar merchandising business, and the trademark protecting its own clothing line quietly stripped away for lack of proof.

Why “use it or lose it” keeps catching F1 off guard

F1’s losses haven’t stopped since. In June 2025, the organization surrendered one of its own iconic F1 trademarks outright, unable to show five years of use amid an ongoing rebranding push. In March 2026, it lost two more EU registrations covering earlier concept logos. On August 17 this year, F1 lost yet another longstanding EU trademark for one of its older logo versions, the same pattern, the same underlying weakness.

The common thread is rebranding. Every time F1 updates its logo or retires an older mark, it risks leaving a paper trail showing exactly when active commercial use of the old version stopped. Once five years pass without fresh evidence, that older registration becomes vulnerable, and EU law puts the burden of proving continued use squarely on the trademark owner, not on the person challenging it.

Sixty-nine filings from one person. A logo history spanning decades. And a fashion and merchandise empire built on marks nobody kept fully proving they still used.

Why this matters beyond one racing logo

Every fashion brand with a long history carries this exact risk. Legacy logos, retired sub-brands, old wordmarks kept “just in case,” all of it needs continuous, documented commercial use, real product, real sales, real dates, or it becomes exposed to the same kind of challenge Hang has run against F1 for years.

Merchandise categories deserve their own attention, not an afterthought. Clothing, footwear, and accessories often get treated as a secondary licensing detail behind a brand’s core product. This case shows that treating apparel trademarks as an afterthought is exactly how a licensing empire loses protection over its own T-shirts and jackets.

Size and fame are not a defense. F1 is one of the most recognized brands on the planet, and none of that mattered once evidence of actual use ran short. The same exposure applies to any fashion house sitting on decades of logos, sub-labels, and past collections.

Reading the runway

One man, working alone, has spent almost thirty years finding the exact gaps in how a global sports and merchandising giant proves it uses its own name.

That’s the real lesson sitting underneath this story. Owning a trademark was never the finish line. Proving you actually use it, year after year, category after category, is the race that never actually ends.

More soon.

The IP Runway

Sources: Law360, Lexology, Mason Hayes & Curran, and EUIPO Cancellation Division and Board of Appeal decisions in proceedings brought by Dieter Hang against Formula One Licensing B.V.