It’s now just a year until the UK host the Olympic games for the first time in 64 years. A lot of people are excited about this (even those people who felt robbed by the ticket ‘raffle’ system). And no doubt there were some crafty marketeers who thought that there would be a prime opportunity to piggy back Olympic fever in the coming months to garner interest in thier own products.
Not surprisingly, the Olympic Games has pre-empted this and defended themselves with some robust copywrite laws. And fair enough. But I don’t think I’d be alone in thinking they have gone too far.
The ruling works like this:
There are two categories of words.
Category 1 – ‘Games’, ‘2012’, ‘Twenty twelve’, ‘Two Thousand and Twelve’
Category 2 – ‘gold’, ‘silver’, ‘bronze’, ‘London’, ‘Medals’, ‘Sponsor’, ‘Summer’
And if anyone unauthorized
(a) uses two words from category 1 (e.g. ‘Games 2012’)
or
(b) uses one word from category 1 and one from category 2 (e.g. ‘Gold Twenty Twelve’)
then they could be found to be breaking the law. And these rules aren’t even exhaustive! The legislation makes room for plenty of other grey areas.
We are all currently acutely aware of the dangers of monopolies in communications industry. And this one worries me because common sense tells me that in many cases it’s ridiculous. We don’t want companies ‘ripping off’ each other’s intellectual property but it seems a misguided and disproportionate allocation of power to allow ANY organisation veto phrases such as – ‘Summer 2012’ or ‘2012 Sponsor’.
In our work with charities I can think of a number of times when we might want to use these phrases like these over the coming months – in ways that would make absolutely no threat to the sanctity of the Olympic Games brand. It seems at best churlish to restrict fundraisers in this way – especially as money gets tighter and times harder.
To be honest, I doubt that the Games would want the bad press of holding a fundraising organisation to task over such a misdourmeaner. Given the heavy-handedness of the legislation we’ll be steering well clear of any obvious transgressions. But we’d suggest that there are other ways of riding on the coat tails of Olympic joy – we just need to be careful and a little clever with our words. Copy that acknowledges ‘a summer of sport’, ‘a special sporting year for Britain’ can help us make the most of the auspicious year without treading on anyones toes .
