French retailer infringed of Roland-Garros rights by using older competition footage in marketing campaign
Published on 23 March 2026
The Paris Judicial Court, in a judgment of 12 February (Ruling No. 23/15958), held that department store Printemps infringed the French Tennis Federation’s (FFT) exclusive exploitation right over the Roland‑Garros tournament by using match footage from 2014 and 2015 editions of the competition in a “Live Shopping” campaign (“Jeu, Set & Match”) broadcast on its website during the 2023 tournament without authorisation.
The videos were deemed acts of exploitation under article L.333‑1 of the French Sports Code: they served a marketing purpose for a commercial website and were not aimed at informing the public. As the department store is not an online news service, it could not rely on the exception in article L.333‑7. The court awarded the FFT 12,000€ in damages for infringement of its exploitation right.
The court rejected the existence of any trademark infringement (the Roland‑Garros references used in hashtag and marketing visuals were seen as "atmosphere”, not brand use), but found an act of parasitism (a form of unfair competition), holding that the department store had, without paying a fee, unfairly leveraged on the tournament’s distinctive imagery and economic value through nine pieces of promotional content reproducing distinctive visual elements of the tournament (clay court, tennis attire, equipment and tennis vocabulary) during the event; it awarded a further €18,000 for parasitic conduct (€2,000€ per infringing item).
Why it matters: Brands cannot freely exploit the image and footage of major sports events for commercial campaigns on their websites or social media channels; organisers’ statutory exploitation rights, unfair-competition rules and the law of parasitism may be powerful tools to prevent such uses.
