The South China Morning Post reports:
“The State Intellectual Property Office has discovered a clause in the patent law that can be used to protect the official designs and logos for the 2008 Olympic Games from mainland companies that have been trying to win rights to them. The designs have been registered as trademarks by the Beijing Olympics organising committee but not patented.”
Which would be fine in most countries where a patent is used to protect the intellectual property of an invention or industrial design while trademarks are used to protect designs for logos and company names. But this is not the case in China, leaving a loophole for opportunists to patent the Olympic Games logo and then charge the Olympic Organzing Committee for its use. Earlier reports indicated that this had already happened, but it is now unclear whether this has happened or not.
A conveniently vague clause in China’s patent laws states that states that ‘patents will not be awarded for inventions and designs in a manner contrary to social morality and damaging to the public interest’. Which can be interpreted pretty much any which way you like, meaning that patent-squatting the Olympic logo is just not going to happen.