Canadian Trademark Blog

Intersection of Vancouver 2010 Olympic Trademarks and the Arts

According to a recent story, the Vancouver Organizing Committe for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games (VANOC) in conjunction with the Artists’ Legal Outreach is conducting a workshop regarding the potential impact of the Olympic and Paralymic Marks Act (the “Act”) on artists’ works that may be critical of the 2010 Olympic Games. Entitled “Running Rings Around Trade-marks The Olympic and Paralympic Marks Act: Issues for Artists“, the workshop is intended to open a dialogue between artists and VANOC.

The dialogue may be necessary, given that artists are worried that any works that they create that include Olympic trade-marks or expressions may cause them to run afoul of the Act. VANOC of course is interested in maintaining the value of the marks and protecting the interests of sponsors with whom it has entered into lucrative deals.

It will be interesting to see the results of the workshop. Some insight into VANOC’s approach may be gained by examining VANOC’s guidelines for not-for-profits to assess permissible use. According to the guidelines, the considerations for acceptable use include: accurate use, relevant use, commercially neutral use, undue prominence, use of Olympic/Paralympic visuals, and unauthorized asssociation. These considerations are rated on a score: 6-8 unlikely to infringe; 9-13 potential infringement that require “enforcement assessment”; 14-18 likely to infringe. Artists will likely be appreciative of further guidance on the subject – the above guidelines are quite subjective. Obviously, it is beneficial for both sides to open this dialogue.

This entry was posted by Karen Monteith on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Branding. 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.