Canadian Trademark Blog

2010 Olympic Mascots

The Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) unveiled the 2010 Olympic mascots on November 27, 2007. A recent Vancouver Sun article discusses the secrecy surrounding the development and design of the mascots, QUATCHI, SUMI, MIGA and MUKMUK. From an intellectual property perspective, it appears to have been a well-orchestrated campaign.

The November 27th launch date was known in advance but applications to register the trade-marks QUATCHI, SUMI, MIGA and MUKMUK were not filed with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office until November 27, 2007. As well, it appears that some of the domain names (miga.ca and quatchi.ca) were not registered until November 27th. The domain name mukmuk.ca was registered to 1686808 Ontario Inc. on November 28, 2007, but it is not clear  whether this entity has any connection to VANOC. The applications for copyright registrations for the mascots were also filed November 27, 2007.

There have been some rumblings from the public that the mascots do not resemble anything. However, from an intellectual property perspective, the whole point is that these mascots are distinctive trade-marks and that should decrease the ability of someone to infringe the marks and designs.

The mascot names were not among the marks listed on the Schedule to Olympic and Paralympics Marks Act, but we would expect to see that VANOC has filed requests for the mascot marks to be advertised as Official Marks. Such requests are not made public until the request is advertised in the Trade-marks Journal.

For a contrast to VANOC’s branding efforts, see the recent story about the counterfeiting problems that the organizers of the Beijing games are experiencing.

This entry was posted by Karen Monteith on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 6:51 pm and is filed under Branding, Registration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.