In an ongoing effort to protect its trademark rights, local and national Olympic officials filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday — this time against a Salt Lake man with a visitor information Web site.

The Salt Lake Olympic Organizing Committee and U.S. Olympic Committee say Robert O'Rourke's site, 2002Lodging.org, makes unauthorized use of many Olympic-related marks and images.

The suit says words such as "Olympic," "2002 Winter Olympics" and "Salt Lake City 2002," and the images of the 2002 Olympic mascots — Powder, Copper and Coal — that O'Rourke uses are protected by trademark, copyright and unfair competition laws.

"The complaint filed today is another in a series of steps being taken by SLOC and the USOC to protect and restore their intellectual property rights and to protect Internet users from deliberate deception," said SLOC president Mitt Romney in a prepared statement. "Most importantly, this is a decisive step to protect athletes who compete in Olympic Games from the misuse of Olympic properties and trademarks with no return to the Olympic Movement."

But O'Rourke says he is as a "little guy," being squeezed by the Olympic elite.

"Why didn't they just ask me by e-mail to change it? I would have in a New York second! For them to go through all of this astonishes me," O'Rourke told the Deseret News.

He also claims he was given the right to sell Olympic-related products on his site by the USOC's associate director of retail marketing, Glen Dalton.

But SLOC officials say Dalton was never approached by O'Rourke for permission to use Olympic marks, only to re-sell mascot toys. Dalton, they say, didn't have the authority to grant that permission anyway.

"Actually, I haven't sold anything yet," O'Rourke said, because the site has only been up and running for four months. It offers mostly printed travel guides and links to the sites of businesses and organizations that offer services to tourists.

On Wednesday morning, the main page of the site had a brief statement from O'Rourke, saying the media had informed him of the suit.

"So, without knowing the details involved, we have taken the proper steps to delete references to the 2002 Winter Olympics," the statement said. Images of the mascots and logos were gone, but the site's Web address remained the same.

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Just last month, the USOC settled a suit with Brighton Ski Resort, which agreed to stop using its Web address, brightonupthegames.com.

SLOC attorney Justin Toth said local Olympic organizers have been involved in "four or five" trademark disputes so far, all of which have "reached favorable results for SLOC."

The USOC says the Amateur Sports Act gives it exclusive rights to words and logos associated with any Olympic Games and has long protected those rights in court.


E-mail: mtitze@desnews.com

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