A Premium on Language

On Friday, March 2nd, Industry Minister Maxime Bernier introduced a bill that so far has received little attention. I learned about it through University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist's blog.

Bill C-47, or the Olympic and Paralympic Marks Act, was supposedly created to deal with ambush marketing, or businesses that hawk unofficial Olympic wares by posing as Games sponsors.

The reach of this bill would be pretty immense and could grant Vancouver Olympic organizers considerable power to control the language that is used to even describe the 2010 Olympics.

The media would be exempt from Bill C-47, but it's not clear what effect the bill could have on independent media and on those seeking to criticize or parody the Olympics. As long as someone isn't trying to sell something that might seem to be associated with the Games, it seems the bill can't clamp down too hard on parody or criticism, but this area remains a little hazy.

I recommend you take a look at some of the verboten phrases and expressions listed at the bottom of the bill . Apparently, the phrases and/or expressions have to be used in conjunction with a registered Olympic symbol for the user to be in dangerous territory. Only the courts would be able to decide if someone has taken too many 'liberties' with 'Olympic language.'

As if this bill doesn't already seem surreal enough, Geist notes that it contains a measure that would allow "a court [to] order all the goods using the marks to be seized by the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, as if public exposure to non-authorized Olympic goods were a public safety issue."

Simply amazing.

I've respectfully borrowed the image above from TrufflePig.