In 2005, Pierre Bourque received a letter from the Royal Canadian Legion asking him to remove the image of a poppy which he had put on his site to commemorate Remembrance Day. I wrote a piece which was published by The Lawyers Weekly, which outlined the legal basis for the action taken by the Legion - as I explained in a post at the time on Let It Bleed, the Legion really doesn't have much choice in the matter: in order to protect their trade-mark rights in the poppy image, they basically have to protest whenever there is an unauthorized use of the poppy.
This year, the Legion, our cultural heritage and intellectual property rights are intersecting once again, as this story in the Globe and Mail relates, this time with respect to white poppies:
The Royal Canadian Legion is threatening to bring out its big guns — the lawyers — in a war with peace activists over poppies.
Veterans say the activists are unlawfully selling white poppies in a fundraising drive that violates trademark rights to the scarlet poppy, which they say belongs to the Legion.
Already, an Edmonton store owned by Michael Kalmanovitch that has been selling the so-called “poppies for peace” has been shipped proof by the Legion's intellectual property lawyer that the veterans association owns the image, regardless of the flower's colour, and has been asked to stop.
“If he [Kalmanovitch] doesn't, then we will proceed with further legal action,” explained Steven Clark, the Ottawa-based remembrance co-ordinator who oversees the poppy trademark for the Legion.
Oliver Kamm offers some background on the "white poppy" initiative (hat tip: Damian Penny).
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