One hundred and eighty
Since the promotion on television, darts became appreciated by a large public. Darts is known for a very long time, but mainly in the United Kingdom and initially as a typical pub happening.
The game is generally played by two players, three arrows per player and a score board with points from 1 to 20 with white, red, black and green planes. These planes divide the board in single, double and triple points. Starting from 501, both players have to throw and score a countdown to zero. One hundred and eighty is the maximum score by targeting three times the triple 20, whereafter the referee shouts out loud "180!”. Other known features are the so-called bull’s eye: the red center circle hit, or a nine darter: scoring the 501 in only nine darts.
Famous entrances
The two players are guided to the playing field by their own typical music tune. Every player has a specific name, like dancing Dimi, who is one of the famous Belgian darts players, performing a typical small dance before starting the game.
Intellectual property in darts
The darts game is full of intellectual property rights. First of all, you have the technical features of the arrows; like the barrel and the flights, next you have the features of the dartboard itself and even specific storage cases for the arrows. All of these are patentable. If you’d like to search in patent databases yourself about dart arrows and dartboards, you can use the following international patent classes (IPC) or the cooperative patent classification (CPC):
- F41J3/0009 with 871 patents or applications
- F42B12/362 with 271 patents or applications and
- F42B6/003 with 613 patents or applications.
The definition of these classes can be retrieved via https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/cpc-browser.
Design, copyright and trademarks
The aesthetics like the shape or the artistic features of the dart attributes can be protected by a design or a copyright. Design registrations can be looked up in design databases, like Design view: https://www.tmdn.org/tmdsview-web/#/dsview. A design search about darts with the Locarno classification ‘21.01’ and the keyword ‘darts’, retrieved 564 results. Copyright protection can be obtained for the artistic features of the flights, the pictures of the players, the colorful creations on the player’s shirts, etc. Last but not least, the trademarks in correlation to darts, comprising the words or even the shapes, can be searched in the database trademark view: https://www.tmdn.org/tmview/#/tmview. In this trademark database, the Nice classification 28 and the keyword ‘darts’, retrieved 631 hits.