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VANOC’s trademark plan raises questions

Olympic officials will offer new information to keep the public on the right side of the law

By Clare Ogilvie

Since the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games revealed the scores of words and phrases they and their partners have claimed as official marks under the Trademark Act, phone calls have been coming in.

“We are starting to get the calls and we are trying to coach people through it as best we can,” said Bill Cooper director of brand protection for VANOC.

VANOC is also revamping the trademark section of its website ( www.vancouver2010.com ) to give as much information to people as possible so that it is clear where the boundaries are.

“We will lay out those considerations very carefully and bucket it in user groups so that we can walk through real examples we have experienced at the Torino Games with specific sections, so the business section, the community institution section, and the public section,” said Cooper.

Included in the list of trademarked words and phrases is “Sea to Sky”, “2010”, “winter” and even “friend”.

When asked why VANOC had taken such a sweeping attitude toward trade marking Cooper said the answer is simple: They have an obligation to the International Olympic Committee to do so, and they have an obligation to their commercial partners to make sure their investment is not diluted in the market place.

“The need relates to the scale of investment,” he said.

“We really are trying to stage a spectacular Games here and we are trying to not only stage spectacular Games but we are contributing significant funding to the Own The Podium program and in order to do that we are demanding an enormous investment from the commercial partners and what we are doing is trying to ensure the protection of their investment.”

In Whistler’s phonebook alone there are 16 companies that use Sea to Sky in their name.

Kal Kaila of Sea to Sky Courier and Freight said there have been some discussions about VANOC’s trade marking of “Sea to Sky”.

But, “we are not concerned,” he said adding that his company does lots of work for VANOC.

The courier company regularly advertises and doesn’t expect there to be any problems in the future but if there were, Kaila said: “We’ll just cross that bridge when we come to it.”

While Olympic organizations have claimed a number of official marks, that has no retroactive impact on companies that used the names prior to VANOC and its partners claiming them.

Whistler’s Charlie Doyle, who won $1,000 from local Chambers of Commerce in the early ’80s for coming up with the phrase Sea to Sky wishes he had trademarked it then.

“I should have done it,” he mused this week.

For him VANOC’s actions are over-the-top.

“Anybody who thought the Olympics was a nice friendly-neighbourhood grouping of athletes is dreaming,” he said. “This is a huge corporation making tons of dough.”

But Cooper insists that what VANOC is doing is no different than what other Olympic host countries have done, and it must be made clear to people now what the rules and regulations are so that there is no ambush marketing leading up to the Beijing Summer Games in 2008 and beyond.

And, said Cooper, VANOC still has another 18 months to raise funds critical to the success of the Games and the long-term support of Canadian athletes.

Companies should bear in mind, said Cooper, that where they are likely to get into trouble is if they intentionally use images that might be associated with the Games, along with certain phrases and their names, all in the same ad.

“A plumbing company that has a name that it has operated under for a number of years is not by definition at all developing an association with the Games,” said Cooper.

“But if a company using one of those marks then over the years leading up to the Games started to add more of those marks and started to develop a functional area within their business that was Olympic in nature and started to do significant above-the-line advertising using images of winter sport layering the meaning, then that may be a threat.”

Along with the official marking actions new federal legislation is also being considered to address the issue of ambush marketing.

Bill C-47, the Olympic and Paralympic Marks Act, guards against ambush marketing in two ways: It grants broad protection to a wide range of Olympic marks like the five-ring symbol and the phrase, “faster, higher, stronger” and it gives VANOC the power to obtain an injunction to stop the use of the phrases or goods that might break the new law.

Cooper believes having the new law is a better alternative than the Trademark Act if problems arise.

“Ultimately if we are successful in getting a bill like that through it will enable us to have to rely less on the trademark law and to not necessarily have such a wide variety of terms protected because the new bill that is being proposed speaks specifically to the act of building unauthorized association without using statutory marks by using a blend of expressions that leads toward that association.”

But in recent days the media has carried several opinion pieces that call into question the passing of Bill C-47.

Said Michael Geist, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa: “Beyond its substantive shortcomings, the bill raises more fundamental concerns about legislative fairness.

“Special interest legislation, particularly legislation blatantly designed to protect a select group of corporate interests at the expense of free speech, should have no place in a government focused on trust and accountability.”