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A key change at iCommons
If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
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Olympic Ideals & Trademark Practice
Francis Deblauwe · Saratoga, CA (United States) · Nov 05th, 2008 9:01 pm · 12 votes · 1 comment
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| Coca-Cola Beijing 2008 Olympics ad, Jing'an Temple Metro Station, Shanghai, by Sinosplice |
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The International Olympic Committee (IOC) organizes the Summer and Winter Olympic Games. That also entails promoting the Olympic ideals of international co-operation and the like. Lately, these competitions have become gigantic in scale and expense. While there were only 241 participants (14 countries) in the first Olympics in Athens (1896), the Beijing Summer Olympics had 10,500 athletes (204 countries). The bidding process for hosting the Olympics has become enmeshed in allegations of bribery. Four members of the IOC resigned and six more were expelled for taking bribes from the organizing committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Concurrently, especially since the Atlanta Games in 1996, there has been a trend toward increased commercialization. "Sponsorship" was initially justified to help offset the costs of staging the Games. However, it has now become apparent that the forces set loose in this rush to get sponsoring and expand the Games, are no longer under control.
Damnatio Memoriae
The Beijing Games this year provided a prime example: lucrative sponsorship contracts had been signed with companies that guaranteed them exclusivity in their product category. This was then enforced into the absurd. A Wall Street Journal article earlier this year reported that everywhere in the Olympic venues the brand logos of "offending" companies, i.e., those that were not official sponsors, were obscured by putting tape over them. For instance, one would get into an elevator and the brand name or logo was "erased," never mind that their product was the one actually being used. The sign on top of the InterContinental Beijing Beichen hotel, attached to the Olympic Main Press Center, was hidden behind an Olympic cover. Even more incredibly, a legion of inspectors armed with tape dispensers were continuously checking on the logos on and if needed reapplying tape. Even brands that were in a category where there wasn't an official sponsor, were convicted to the same damnatio memoriae. No exposure without paying up! It is estimated that the Beijing Olympics received a cool $1.5 billion from sponsors.
With Glowing Hearts
The brand protection efforts don't stop there. The 2010 Vancouver Winter Games are already casting a long shadow. Recently, the Canadian Olympic Committee applied to the authorities for trademark rights to the phrase "with glowing hearts," a phrase from the Canadian national anthem O Canada, a work that is in the public domain. They want to use it as the official motto. Of course, they will claim that they only wish to protect Olympic merchandising and sponsorships from unfair competition but there are bad precedents. The US Olympic Committee (USOC) has threatened and legally harassed businesses in Washington state for using "Olympic" in their names. The Olympic Cellars Winery near Port Angeles received a "cease-and-desist" letter from a USOC lawyer in 2007, even after they had in 1999 gotten USOC's permission to use the website www.olympiccellars.com. They have now reached a settlement with the USOC: graciously, they can keep their name as long as they don't market their wine east of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. The "Olympic" in their name and numerous other companies' names refers to the Olympic Peninsula, a major geographic feature that contains, you guessed it, Mount Olympus. Maybe the Native American gods living on its top can take a cue from their Greek counterparts and strike down the USOC scoundrels by lightning...
tags: international policy-law local-context-global-commons copyright olympics
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