The Canadian government's copyright police may be coming after you if you display our coat-of-arms or Canada's "wordmark", which I can't show here without being nailed. (It's the word "Canada" with the flag over the letter "a".)To date, the coat-of-arms police have gone after websites (Sex Trade Workers of Canada), an immigration advice service, a shady online university, patriotic coffee mugs, someone selling model RCMP cars on eBay, the Transhuman Church of Enlightenment, a Canadian lawyer advertising in Korea, a fitness club, 40,000 baseball caps sold at Zellers, and Little Sister's Book Store.
Yes, Big Brother went after Little Sister. And many more.
You'll have to read the article to understand why the Sex Trade Workers of Canada were using the coat-of-arms.
The "Transhuman Church of Enlightenment"? Turns out they weren't that enlightened after all...maybe they are now.
One prominent Canadian blog, BlogsCanada, has also had to change its design.
When the federal phone call told him to get rid of the layout that imitated a federal government site, wordmark and all, he replied that "he had been waiting to be contacted on this issue for nine months and will resist complying with a cease and desist order until the last minute ... generating publicity in the meantime," according to records obtained by Ottawa researcher Ken Rubin.
(The site has since been changed.)
As the Ottawa Citizen reports, perhaps the most bizarre use of Canada's symbols is that of Britain's Shepperton University, one of those places that sells degrees - cheap - which has poached our coat-of-arms and still refuses to stop using it. Now, how much can you trust a "university" that steals another country's official symbol?
(I can still use our Canadian flag here, right? I'll let you know if I get any "official" phone calls.)
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