Impact Wrestling Granting Talent The Rights to Their Characters

– Impact Wrestling is now granting talent the rights to their characters and intellectual property. As noted in Impact’s statement in response to Matt Hardy’s teasing his Broken Character, the company’s “new talent agreements all incorporate language that allow talent to continue to use their IMPACT persona after they leave the company. We are working with our legal team to amend our existing agreements to extend this to all of our current and former talent.”

According to PWInsider, the move is being made in order to open up relations between the company and its talent roster. Essentially, this will allow contracted talent to take characters, such as Ethan Carter’s EC3 name and associated IP such as mannerisms and catchphrases, to other companies if they depart.

The company initially claimed that they owned the rights to the Hardys’ Broken Universe characters and sent ROH a cease-and-desist letter back in March prohibiting them from using the Broken gimmick at the 15th Anniversary show. They then tried to trademark the gimmick, with Jeff Jarrett and Impact Wrestling president Ed Nordholm arguing that Impact owned the gimmick. The whole thing hurt Impact’s image as it tried to reband under Anthem.

PWInsider says that Nordholm made the decision to rework the talent contracts.