More Olympic Trade-mark Issues
Protecting the official trademarks of the Olympic Games is proving to be an ongoing challenge for the organizers of the Beijing 2008 Games, as well as the Vancouver 2010 Games. We reported some time ago regarding possible new Canadian legislation. Beijing organizers are now threatening legal action against pranksters that are using the Internet to poke fun at several of the official marks of the Beijing Games.
The website of the Vancouver Organizing Committee includes a 36-page list setting out the official marks of the Vancouver Organizing Committee and the Canadian Olympic Committee, including the Beijing Games marks that are currently being targeted. A portfolio of that size will likely generate some interesting new developments in trademark law as we draw closer to the 2010 Games.
This entry was posted by Larry Munn on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Famous Marks, Protection & Enforcement. 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.
2 Responses to “More Olympic Trade-mark Issues”
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Hi, Larry…
Actually the 2010 list to which you refer was as of April 2006, and the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games (VANOC) has been actively adding another 23 marks since that date. As part of our business news service, Morgan:News:2010, we track that aspect of the organization’s activities as well.
What’s interesting is the difficulty businesses have in keeping out of the way of such an active trademark development. VANOC, for instance, doesn’t list anywhere the full set of marks it currently owns (or is about to own). How is a company — particularly your average T-shirt silkscreener — to know whether a slogan they thought they developed is going to be OK or bring down VANOC’s wrath unless it can figure out how to use the CIPO database?
The other interesting development is that VANOC deliberately prevented anybody from seeing its inushuk-style logo and its Paralympic Games logo so it could gain marketing muscle from launching them during, in the main emblem’s case, a one-hour national TV show. It did not file or advertise them via CIPO, as far as we’ve been able to determine, in any public way before the launches.
Another emblem launch, this time of the aboriginal logo during the VANOC Aboriginal Summit conference in Vancouver February 2, is expected, and BC Premier Gordon Campbell is expected to do the honours.
I’m intrigued by a comment you made in your blog: ” A portfolio of that size will likely generate some interesting new developments in trademark law as we draw closer to the 2010 Games.” In what sense?
Hopefully, the URL below will prompt CIPO’s database to list the additional 23 marks filed by VANOC since last April: . If not, here’s the database query that will get you the list:
Search for: Vancouver Organizing Committee in the Current Owner Name
within: All
with a status of: All
that were: Filed from 4 April 2006 to 16 January 2007
/Peter Morgan, Editor, Morgan:News:2010, a news service that tracks the business side of the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Thank you Peter for your comments. Whenever there is active trademark or brand development by an organization it may be difficult to keep out of the way. The added difficulty with an organization such as VANOC is their right to use official marks, which, unlike “ordinary” trademarks, cannot be opposed when they are advertised in the Trade-marks Journal (although you can challenge them by way of judicial review).
The earlier comment regarding new developments, was only intended to reflect the fact that large portfolios of marks inevitably generate disputes, some of which may require legal decisions. One of the leading Canadian decisions regarding official marks arose our of a dispue with the Canadian Olympic Association (Canadian Olympic Assn. v. Konica Canada Inc. (1992), 39 C.P.R. (3d) 400 (F.C.A.)).