The tale of two Brooklyn Half Marathons came to an end Tuesday when one of them changed its name amid legal pressure.
The NYCRuns Brooklyn Half Marathon will now be called the NYCRuns Brooklyn Experience Half Marathon, the organizer announced. The title of Brooklyn Half will remain in the hands of rival organizer New York Road Runners.
NYRR has put on its 13.1-mile race in Brooklyn since 1981; the 2025 race is set for May 17. Its current naming sponsor is the Royal Bank of Canada.
NYCRuns was founded in 2009 and began its late-April Brooklyn race in 2018. Until Tuesday it was known as the “NYCRuns Brooklyn Half Marathon.”
NYRR filed a complaint against NYCRuns in federal court in February 2024 seeking full ownership of the Brooklyn Half name. The legal move came after NYRR contacted NYCRuns in February 2023 expressing its concerns, according to the complaint, after which NYCRuns continued using the Brooklyn Half Marathon name to promote its 2024 race.
NYRR’s argument was based on trademark law claiming people could be confused by both races having the same name, and said in its complaint that it has been contacted by runners who signed up and paid for the wrong race. (And threw a dig that NYCRuns events “do not enjoy the same established, quality reputation” as theirs do.) NYRR also argued it has earned claim to the name because it has used it for decades.
That historical reasoning is why the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted NYRR’s trademark request for Brooklyn Half in 2017. The USPTO originally said the organization’s petition was mainly geographical, so NYRR claimed it “acquired distinctiveness” by using its name for at least five years—making it a term people associate with its event in particular.
“If somebody started today as American Airlines for an airline that’s literally in America, we would immediately say, ‘Well, that’s descriptive, you can’t register that as a trademark,’” trademark law expert Carissa Weiss tells Front Office Sports. “But, at this stage of the game, we uniquely know that mark is referring to a single company that is not United and is not JetBlue, right?
“So that’s what acquired distinctiveness is. It’s long use over time that gets the consuming public to think of something that would otherwise be descriptive as uniquely associated with you,” Weiss says.
Becoming distinctive is the goal in trademark efforts. A descriptive term is too broad for a trademark, but a distinctive one sets it apart. This is also something NYCRuns is achieving by amending its name change.
“ I think in this context, Brooklyn Experience does the job of having us keep these two marathons apart,” another trademark law expert, Marty Schwimmer, tells FOS. “And you won’t have people signing up for the wrong one, as was alleged in the complaint.”
To Schwimmer, it’s interesting that this dispute even had to go to court, given that NYRR had already reached out to NYCRuns about the name.
“If my client came in, ‘Hey, we got this demand letter today.’ I would look up and I would say, ‘Hey, New York Road Runners has a registration that’s five years old for the term Brooklyn Half Marathon. This just isn’t worth it. Go, change the name,’” Schwimmer says. “That’s how it should have played out.”
But NYCRuns denied NYRR’s allegations to the court in March, and called NYRR’s Brooklyn Half marks “weak and unenforceable.”
The two sides began a period of discovery before agreeing to a “settlement in principle” on Oct. 25, according to court filings. NYRR voluntarily dismissed the case Dec. 16, and it was terminated the next day.
A spokesperson for NYCRuns tells FOS the lawsuit was “amicably resolved” and the group thinks the new name “better identifies the race for runners as an authentic Brooklyn running experience.” A spokesperson for NYRR also tells FOS the matter reached an “amicable resolution.”
