Virgin F1 Online Gambling Ads Under Scrutiny
27th May, 2010
Virgin F1 cars were recently sponsored by Full Tilt; however they will be unable to use full branding throughout the F1 world tour according to eGaming Review due to legal restrictions.
Due to this Full Tilt are publicizing their sponsorship of Virgin Racing with its fulltilt,net ‘poker school’ despite the URL of its real money site being absent from branding on the cars.
Tom Lippiett, an associate at law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner, said: “The use of specific dot net signage in Monaco suggests that Virgin will tailor the branding depending on the territory. I would anticipate that if they are adopting a case-by-case approach to risk, they will run the dot net branding in the majority of races”.
Dot net branding appears on the uniforms of drivers Timo Glock and Lucas di Grassi.
However, even this form of advertising may cause problems when racing in Italy as they have introduced restrictions on the basis that it could encourage players to move to real money sites so this form of advertising could encounter problems.
In the UK full branding is legal whereas territories such as Spain are more ‘grey’ as full branding is still used despite legal restrictions.
However, “even allowing for the argument that it’s an ad for the dot net site, use of the full branding is likely to amount to a technical offence in almost all the countries in which the races are held,” Lippiett warned.
By Carol
