This is Bloomberg Law with June Grossel from Bloomberg Radio.
There's something centers to going on here. There's something bigger than just the FBI confiscating the records that they.
Took, and Fulton County Chairman Rob Pitts says they're asking a federal court to order the FBI to return the roughly seven hundred boxes of ballots, voter rolls, and other election records seized in a raid about a week and a half ago. Pitt warned that the raid foreshadows further federal action on elections elsewhere in the country.
This is I think probably the first step in whatever they're going to do in Tota to depress voter participation, voter registration, making whatever changes they think are necessary to help their case in twenty twenty six, but more importantly in twenty twenty eight.
This is the Jnstice Department has sued twenty four Star and DC for refusing to turn over voter data, and President Trump has been doubling down on his calls to nationalize elections.
I wouldn't see elections be honest, and if a state can't run an election, I think the people behind me should do something about it.
Of course, the Constitution gives the authority to administer elections to the states. My guest is Barbara mcquad, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and a former US attorney. Barbara, the FBI sees the records using a grand jury subpoena as part of a criminal investigation. What do you think is going on here?
It's unknown, of course, but we have some hints. I mean, one is they got a search for which means a magistrate judge found probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime would be found there. And we know from the public filing that what they obtained were ballots, tabulation tapes, and voter roles.
Now twenty twenty.
Is six years ago, and so it would seem that anything that occurred during that year would be time barred by the five year statute of limitations. But of course that's not something that a magistrate judge had taken into consideration at that stage. Perhaps there's some allegation of an ongoing conspiracy that could keep that allegation fresh. I don't know. But also you can't ignore the simultaneous civil request that Trump's doj has been making to try to get voter
rolls from a number of states, including Georgia. They have failed in states where decisions have been made, like California and Oregon, where judges have said no, the federal government is not entitled to this stuff. So are they simply using criminal process to get that which they could not obtain otherwise.
But the fact that a magistrate.
Found probable cause suggests that there is more information than than we currently know.
The prosecutor whose name was on the warrant was not the US attorney in Atlanta, but the Saint Louis US attorney, Thomas Albis, who's been appointed by Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate so called election integrity cases nationwide. How unusual is that sort of skipping over the local US attorney.
Yeah, it's really unusual, but not illegal.
I mean, so much of what the Trump administration does is technically lawful, but either unusual or you know, discretion you'd rather see someone not exercise. I suppose ordinarily you would expect the US attorney from the Northern District of Georgia to oversee any search conducted within his jurisdiction. That's the way it's done in ninety nine point nine percent
of the cases. The Attorney General does, however, have the authority to appoint a special attorney to investigate any matters that she chooses, and we've seen this done over the years.
For example, Pat Fitzgerald.
Who was the US Attorney in Chicago at the time, handled the Scooter Libby case. I think that was an effort to just sort of get it out of Washington so that it wouldn't have the stench of politics. I know that Anne Tompkins out of North Carolina handled the prosecution of General Petraeus. For example, John Durham, before he was the special counsel looking at the origins of the Russia investigation, actually investigated CIA torture.
At one time, So it's not unprecedented.
It's often in sort of politically charged cases where the Attorney General may appoint somebody outside of Washington who's a US attorney or it doesn't have to be to handle maybe sensitive cases. And I think it's especially true if the case might transcend the boundaries of a particular judicial district. So maybe this case is going to include not just Georgia but some other states, so that might make some sense.
I worry a little bit.
I don't know Thomas Albis, but I do know that he comes from Missouri, and he's got sort of the association with election.
Deniers that causes me some concern.
And you remember, in twenty twenty, there was a different US attorney Trump appointed in the Northern District of Georgia by the name of B. J. Pack, and he resigned in December of twenty twenty when Trump started asking Brad Raffensberg or the Secretary of State there to find me eleven seven hundred and eighty votes. So you wonder if it isn't the case that these US attorneys who've got
backgrounds as federal prosecutors. As the current US attorney there in Northern Georgia does I think his name is Hertzberg. You know, he's a career a USA. But Trump's not going to make the same mistake twice, right, He's going to make sure he's got somebody he can trust that Pam Bondy has handpicked to handle this very sensitive operation as opposed to the person who would ordinarily assign this case too.
And actually the Special Agent in charge of the Atlanta Field Office resigned from his post about a week before the agent served the war and there was no public explanation.
Yeah, that's another red flag, I suppose. And I don't know whether he resigned or was fired, and I don't know why he left. I know cash Pttel has been firing agents who had anything to do with either the Trump investigations or the January sixth investigations, which itself is improper.
There's no allegation that engaged in any misconduct. They just don't like the cases that they worked on, so we.
Don't know why. But again, that would be another safeguard there. The Special Agent in charge of the FBI runs the FBI office in Atlanta. That office was tasked with conducting this search, and so the special Agent in charge would be someone who'd be in a position to push back and say, no, we're not going to do this.
I don't think it's lawful.
I don't think it's an appropriate use of our power, or at least.
Let's talk about this.
And the fact that he was either fired or resigned again is just one more red flag and another irregularity among many.
And yet another irregularity, Fulton County officials say they're typically given copies when records are taken but they weren't given any copies this time by the FBI, and there was no chain of custody inventory taken when the records were seized. So basically they don't know exactly what records are missing, and when the FBI returns the records, they won't be able to verify if they've gotten everything back.
Oh what a mess.
I didn't know that, So, you know, the chaos of the Trump administration never ceases to amaze me. I mean, of course, ordinarily, when the FBI conducts a search, there is a whole protocol for how that's done. They get training at Quantico for how to do this. There is an agent who leads the search, and then there are other agents assigned to the search. They assign various agents,
at least two to every room that gets searched. When there are computers involved, they track what it is they're taking or whether they're just copying it, and documenting that carefully is critically important, number one, so that everybody knows what was taken, so the rightful owner of the property
kind of requested back. But also if you're going to use this at evidence at trial, you have to authenticate it and show that chain of custody so that the jury knows this isn't something that you just manufactured once you got back to the FBI office, that you can have a witness testify. I am the one who showed up at the Fulton County Election office on such and such day. I took this document into my hands, or I copied it from a computer or whatever it was. I put my initials on it. I put it in
an evidence bag. I labeled the drive whatever it is, so that that chain of custody can be retrieved at trial. It makes me wonder whether they're obtaining this evidence not so much for any future criminal case, but for some other purpose.
I don't know what that purpose would be.
And I was saving the biggest irregularity for last. Barbara, the Director of National Intelligence. Tulsi Gabbard was at the raid. She initially said that President Trump had asked her to be there, but there have been shifting explanations from the administration about why she was at the scene of a domestic law enforcement operation. Listen to what Attorney General Bondi said when asked about that D and I.
Gabbard and I are inseparable. We are constantly together, as are the people behind us. We constantly talk, we collaborate as a cabinet. We're all extremely close.
They may be inseparable, but Bondi wasn't at the raid in Georgia. And in addition, Gabbard facilitated a call between the President and the FBI agents after the search on speaking.
All of this highly irregular and bizarre.
So there are two reasons it's bizarre to me that Tulsi Gabbard was there. Number One, a person at her level, the Director of National Intelligence, like just should have better things to do.
Right.
They have trained agents for this work. You would not expect the Attorney General to be there.
You would not expect the head of the FBI to be there, Right, This is in the trenches kind of work that agents are trained to do and do every day. So the idea that she's there, and she's there like, you know, in a ball cap and everything, Like, what is she rolling up her sleeves and grabbing evidence?
I don't think so.
So just bizarre that she's physically present at the scene, first of all.
Second of all, this.
Really feels like something way beyond her remit. Her job is to coordinate intelligence collection among the eighteen intelligence agencies in the federal government, and then to report to the President about the results of those findings, to answer any questions he may have to advise him about threats to the national security. These are threats coming from foreign actors, so that suggests that they're there is some foreign nexus to this search. I can't imagine what that would be.
It kind of goes back to some of those conspiracy theories. Remember when Sidney Powell was saying things like dominion falsely, I'll add dominion voting machines were programmed by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, like what? And then remember there was some tie to Italy that caused William Barr to actually travel there with John Durham when they were investigating the origins of the Russian investigation. They never found anything there. The
Inspector General never found anything relating to these things. It seems like it was all just wild, crazy stuff that was manufactured. But here we are again with some suggestion that there's some foreign nexus to all of this.
I don't know what it is.
But if there's not any foreign nexus, highly improper for Tulsa Gabbert to be there. But if she's there, it does raise this specter of is there some foreign nexus to this? And I just can't imagine where this is going. But brace yourself, June.
I've been bracing myself every day. Thanks so much, Barbara. That's Professor Barbara McQuaid of the University of Michigan Law School. Coming up next. The score is windmills five Trump zero. I'm June Grosso and you're listening to Bloomberg.
Did I know windmills very much.
I've studied it better than anybody.
You'll see these things all over the place.
They destroy everything.
They're horrible and the most expensive energy there is. They ruin the environment, they kill the birds, they kill the wealth. Darling, I want to watch Donald Trump on television tonight, but the winds stop blowing and I can't watch.
There's no electricity in the house.
Darling.
You want to see a bird cemetery, go under a windmill sometime you'll see the status.
President Donald Trump has been a vehement critic of wind power for years, deriding wind turbines as bird killing eye sores and wmalsely claiming it's the most expensive form of energy, causes cancer and drives whales crazy. And Trump has aggressively tried to cripple the wind power industry in his second term.
Within hours of returning to the White House in twenty twenty five, he issued a directive that froze new permitting for wind energy and ordered officials to consider terminating any existing leases.
We don't allow windmills.
We're not allowing any windmills to go up.
And so in December, the Department of the Interior ordered a pause on five multi billion dollar wind farm projects under construction, saying it was due to unspecified national security concerns. While this week, for the fifth time, a federal judge found that the administration's permitting freeze was illegal and granted
a preliminary injunction to block its stop work order. Now all five of the wind farms plaus and in federal waters have gotten the go ahead from judges, although the Trump administration says it will keep finding them in court. My guest is an expert in environmental law, Pat Parento, a professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School. Pat tell us what happened when five different judges took a look at the Interior Department stop work orders on these wind farm projects.
So Trump is zero for five basically in these cases. And the interesting thing is these are a variety of judges. Two of them were appointed by Trump, and a third one, Royce Lambert, who just issued the final nail in the coffin for this stop work order. He was nominated by Ronald Reagan. So you know, we're not talking about woke judges.
We're talking about conservative judges. All of them, without exception, have said that this order, this stop work order on five offshore wind projects, but which by the way, is six pigawatts. Okay, it's designed to serve more than two and a half million homes and businesses all up and down the East Coast. So you know, this is a really really significant amount of electricity that the stop work
order has tried to halt. So there's a preliminary injunction against all of the stop work orders at this point.
The Trump administration, the Interior Department, has said that they're suspending these because of national security risks. It didn't disclose the security risk, but it claimed that the Department of Defense provided new classified information about advances and adversary technologies that could raise national security issues with offshore wind projects. I'm not sure what that means. And Judge Lamberth looked at those confidential documents and said he didn't get it.
He didn't see the security risks right.
He said, there was no proof of imminent threat to national security at all. On the other hand, he said that stopping the work orders was going to cost these companies two million dollars a day. One of the projects, Vineyard Win, was ninety five percent complete, it's already sending some electricity to the grid. And two of the other projects, one of them was forty percent complete, the other one
sixty five percent complete. So you got to remember these are projects that have gone through an incredible amount of vetting, including Department of Defense vetting, including clearance from the Department of Defense. Of course, that was the Department of Defense
before Trump. So when Trump now comes up with these secret classified documents demonstrating a threat to national security, and as you point out, Jadge Lambeth looked at them and said, I don't see it, it does raise the serious question is this all just a pretext for Trump's you know, well known animosity, outright hostility to win power. And it all comes from the fact that he owns a golf course in Scotland and from his golf course, you can see wind farms off the coast of Scotland generating all
kinds of clean electricity. He doesn't like the look of them. He's come up with all kinds of reasons why they're bad. They cause cancer, no they don't. They kill a disproportionate number of birds, No they don't. They're unreliable, no they're not. They're too expensive, No they're not. So that's where we are.
Pat You left out that Trump says they drive the whales crazy.
Oh, the whales, don't forget the whales. Yeah, and all of this has been true. And you know, years and years not only of vetting in the agencies, but the whale issue in particular has been up and down the courts in the first circuit and the second circuit repeatedly, and none of the cases have found a serious threat to the whales. Believe me, if there was a serious threat to the whales, you'd be hearing about it from me.
That's true. I know all the work you've done on preserving wildlife and endangered species. Do you think another reason that Trump may object to wind power is that he wants more power to be generated from natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy. There's also the fact that former President Joe Biden supported renewable energy with things like tax credits.
Yeah, anything that Biden supported, he's going to kill. And you know, these arguments just fall apart the studies that have been done by banks serious people. Right, I'll say that wind and solar energy are the cheapest forms of energy to bring online quickly. Not that they're going to
solve all of our problems. They're not. You need base load electricity, But when it comes to really costing out, you know, the life cycle costs of these various energy transmission options, and you look at everything from where do you get the materials, you know, whether it's fuel or other things to build these systems, and then how much does it cost to buy the fuel for these systems? Just think about it. The wind is free, the sun
is free. Once you've installed these systems, these wind turbines offshore, you don't suffer the fluctuations of gas prices. You know, you don't have oil spills. You have wind spills, but not oil spills. So the sober analysis of renewables is saying to meet the growing demand for electricity, including the huge one from AI data, centers. You need more wind and solar, You need all kinds of forms of energy, but you in particular need projects that are almost complete and ready to go.
The White House said they're going to continue fighting in court. Do you think that appellate courts might have a different viewpoint?
They might, You know, you always have to leave open the possibility that a different panel of judges would reach a different conclusion. But the point is that the evidence here of a national security threat consists of a document or documents, right, and so you don't have witnesses. Yeah, I mean some other judges might look at these documents
and reach a different conclusion than Judge Lamberts did. But the rule is the trial court's decision to issue an injunction if it's reasonable, right, if it's based on an analysis of whether the government's stated reason for these stop work orders passes muster. I don't think the courts of appeal are going to overturn these preliminary injunctions. The cases are preceding the proponents of these projects, primarily or Sted, the Denmark firm. They're bounded determined to work with the
Trump administration to resolve whatever their questions are. The real question is with the signals coming from these wind turbines to the grid, would they interfere with military radar readings. That's what it comes down to. And you know, the companies are saying, hey, look, if if you need more safeguards and more mitigation of whatever risks you think there are, we're all about addressing that and fixing that. We have decades of experience with building these systems, running these systems.
In every country in which they're operating, they have the same set of radar and military needs and national security needs, and if there are issues out there, they can be dealt with.
Pat Despite the fact that the Trump administration is losing in court, court battle after court battle over the wind farms, the shift in policy under Trump, I mean even the so called One Big Beautiful Bill sped up the phase out of federal tax credits for offshore wind projects. So has the policy shift and this general assault on wind power increase the risks of investing in it so that
it's unlikely that you'll have new projects. The ones that are ongoing now they'll fight to keep, but new projects, I mean, I think the government's not even going to approve new projects.
Yeah, yes, that is the bigger threat here that they're going to discourage investment. And when you think about it, this is foreign investment. This isn't costing US companies or US taxpayers and nickel to build these things. This is free money that we're getting, and it's billions and billions of dollars. And oh, by the way, if you think about it, just simply delaying these five projects at two million dollars a day, who do you think is ultimately
going to pay for that? The consumers of electricity. And so there are studies out there saying an extended delay like this could cost consumers billions of dollars because of the amount of electricity that these would generate. So the chilling effect on investment is the goal of this administration. I mean, they don't really care if they lose in court. They'll just keep appealing if they can, all the way
to the Supreme Court if they can. But their real goal is to stifle renewable energy and particularly win and I hate to say it, but they're succeeding in that. You know, that's not in the national interest, if not in the national security interest, to cripple a major source of electricity at a time when we're seeing escalating demands for it, How does that make any sense at all?
Well, that's a question I certainly can't answer, but thanks so much Pad for all your answers today. That's Professor Pat Parento of the Vermont Law and Graduate School coming up next on the Bloomberg Law Show. Yes, Dominions will be taking the eyes at the Winter Olympics after a music licensing saga is resolved, and how the Olympic Committee is aggressively targeting the unauthorized commercial use of its trademarks.
And it's not just the bic rings and the torch, it's also phrases like let the Games begin, I'm June Grosso and you're listening to Bloomberg. It was in doubt for a while, but it now appears that those mischievous Minions will be taking the ice at the Winter Olympics. After all, the cheeky characters have been causing a musical
nightmare for Spanish figure skater Tomasquarino Saubat. He's been using a medley from the Minions films while dressed in their iconic blue overalls and yellow T shirt in its performances all season, believing he'd gone through the proper protocols to use the music, but then last week NBC Universal told him he didn't have permission to use the music, and
Guarino thought he'd have to scrap his whole routine. But there was an outpouring of support for the skater on social media, with people posting hashtag let the Minions skate and Universal Studios had a change of heart. Joining me is intellectual property litigator Terrence Ross, a partner at Katon Muchen Rosaman Jerry. Some people were calling this Minions Gate, and I just don't understand why Universal didn't give him
permission in the first place. It seems like having the Minions represented at the Olympics would be a plus for the franchise and the studio.
Yes, I agree with that completely. Apparently he had flown under the radar of the copyright folks at Universal for most of the season, but now that he's in the Olympics, and I guess NBC has got the coverage rights to the Olympics and they're owned by Universal.
Probably somebody in the sports.
Broadcasting called it to the attention and Universal, this guy's using the Minions music.
Did you approve it, and Universal had not.
The Spanish skater had never obtained advance approval. The music is copyrighted, as was the film, as all music is copyrighted. And a friend of mine said, well, yeah, but it's the Olympics aren't taking place in the United States. They're taking place in Italy, and I says, come on, guys, in the modern world, we have international treaties where almost all the countries sign up to and allow enforcement of their copyrights in other countries through the simplicity of filing
a couple pieces of paper with an international organization. So that's not going to excuse this guy.
And at some.
Point during the last week or so it seemed like he was really not going to be able to perform his music.
Well, this got a lot of attention, a lot of negative attention, I think for NBC Universal, and there was a lot of sympathy on social media for the ice skater. So perhaps Universal saw which way the wind was blowing and did a turnaround, allowing him to use the music after all.
Ultimately, that's what the Spanish skater said. He thanked Universal for letting him do it. He thanked all his fans for calling out the problem and getting Universal.
Pay attention to it.
You know, it just comes back to the point he made at the beginning, Why would you not want your music being used in a setting like that and getting all the international exposure. I guess Universal was taking the position that Minions and the various Minions movies are so well known that they don't need any more exposure from some ice skater in Spain.
And what happens if he falls down journey to music?
You know, I couldn't see that kind of conversation going on within the Universal legal department, and so they sent out a cease and desist letter and thankfully sanity prevailed and he's been authorized to use it. I was dying to see if he got some sort of written license agreement, but that hasn't shown up at the press.
But yeah, he gets to use it now.
And you know, it's funny because if you're making a movie, if you're making a television show, there's literally a person who gets credit on the screen who's called the music supervisor, and they're not the people who make the music or write the score.
Music supervisor references the person who's responsible for getting all the licenses for the music, and so it's literally a job in the movies and television, but apparently in ice dancing they haven't gotten that for yet.
Skaters used to use classical music that's in the public domain and didn't need clearance, but then in twenty fourteen, the International Skating Union relaxed its rules to allow contemporary music with lyrics. But when you use contemporary music that's not in the public domain, you need to get permission. And as you said, it's so complicated because one piece of music can involve getting how many authorizations.
You know, I feel sorry for them.
We've had this discussion before in the context of documentaries, where a documentary filmmaker wants to use a short piece of music, they just want to be cautious. Arguably they could claim fair use, but they want to be cautious, so they ask for advance approval. And you know, filmmakers are typically not lawyers, just as ice skaters typically aren't lawyers, and the bureaucratic process of trying to get it is very challenging. And then there's the problem at the other end.
You jump through all the hoops, you ask for permission, and they go, what you're not paying us for this? And then they try to collect, you know, a couple bucks out of you, and it's a challenging process. And I feel sorry for these ice skaters to put a beautiful performances quite frankly, that they're not lawyers and they've got the Olympic Committee or somebody should figure out a way to get these guys some help.
Well, apparently they've been trying but not succeeding. Sabate, for example, said he followed the prescribed procedure forgetting his music approved through a system called click clear in August. So obviously there's a lot more or work to be done there. Jerry, let's turn out to the Olympics and the way the Olympic Committee guards its trademarks so aggressively and they have a lot to guard. Tell us about the sort of IP regime that's special to the Olympics.
Well, it's a great legal question.
And every couple years when we either had the Winter Olympics or Summer Olympics, the Olympic Committee literally sends out notices about six months ahead of time warning people, and they post things on their website and they are very aggressive in enforcing their intellectual property rights. But it's a completely different regime than what we usually talk about June. It's not under the Landham Act, which is the name
of the United States Trademark Lass. A number of years ago, Congress passed a law entitled the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act, and it.
Is very unique.
It's thirty six US Code Section twenty two oh five oh six, and what it does is set up a special intellectual property rights regime for the United States Olympic Committee. And it says that the five rings, you know, the international symbol of the Olympics, the five rings also the
Pan American sports symbol, which I'm less familiar with. The words Olympic, OLYMPIAD, Paralympic, PARALYMPIAD, pan American, parapan American, all those words are all exclusively within the use of the United States Olympic Committee.
I mean, has nothing to do with the trademark laws.
The Congress has simply taken this group of words and symbols and given them to the United States Olympic Committee. Incredibly unusual. It's the only ball like that I know of in the United States.
I was looking at the guidelines that they have on a website entitled Commercial and brand usage guidelines, and I found some of the trademarks really surprising. For example, they've trademarked the phrase let the Games begin. I mean that seems so generic. Let the Games begin is used in a lot of different contexts, not just in the Olympic realm.
You're absolutely right. Now, there is one distinction within the law. Specific words are set aside and you just can't use them period. Now there's a couple exceptions to that. If you're in that part of the state of Washington where the town of Olympia is, and I guess there's a set of mountains there, cascades mountains, and you do business there, you can use the word Olympic or Olympia, and you can also use the word Olympics Olympia for a sportscaster
talking about the games in a non commercial context. So that's one part of the regime. The other part of the regime is there's this very broad provision that says, i'll just read it here. Any trademark, trade name, sign, symbol, or insignia falsely representing association with their authorization by the
International Olympics Committee also violates the law. Now that's the a little bit different from using the word Olympics or pan Olympics or para Olympics in those cases like you gave the example, let the Games begin, that's not one of the words exclusively consigned to the Olympic Committee. But they can still come after you under this other provision in that it suggests an association with the Olympics that is not true.
It's harder to prove.
That, though, Terry, I've been reading about what the Olympic Committee characterized as ambush marketing. There were Subway commercials that showed Michael Phelps swimming across an animated map toward Canada during the Vancouver Games and the voiceover said where the action is this winter. The Olympic Committee said it was an attempt to falsely associate Subway with the Olympics as a sponsor.
In the Rio Games.
There were a lot of billboard advertising that did the same sort of thing, and the Olympic Committee went crazy over that. There was a case in the Supreme Court that conceals at this statute number of years ago, and the statute was challenged as being the violation of the First Amendment and being unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court said no, it's not as long as it has to do with commercial use. And you know, Michael Phelps doing a subway
commercial would be a commercial use. They have an absolute right to these words. And the Supreme Court, you know, looked at the legislative history and said, look, the whole reason we have this law is so that sponsors will pay money to the Olympic Committee to use these marks, and that will pay for our athletes to compete in a competitive manner abroad. And when other companies undercut that, you're really undercutting the United States Olympic effort.
Supreme Court came right out and.
Said that that particular suggestion let the games begins would have to be tested under some sort of confusion standard. Now, the Supreme Court, in the same case called San Francisco Arts and Athletics versus the US Olympic Committee, the Supreme Court said, you've got to look at the statute broadly, because Congress has had a broad protection and oh, by the way, we don't apply the traditional Lanham Act evaluation standard,
which is likelihood of confusion. Now you sometimes see that still being argued, but I don't know how else do you evaluate. That's a great example you gave and that would be very challenging. The Olympic Committee would probably go after somebody for that, but I think they might have trouble convincing a judge depending on the usage.
So one of my favorite parts of the commercial use guidelines was please do not create your own version of any USOPC trademarks. For example, the Olympic symbol should not be simulated using pizzas, onion rings, tires, beverages, basketball, snowflakes, triangle smiley faces, fruits and vegetables, et cetera. I had to laugh that they actually put all that in their commercial guidelines on the website.
It's just testament to the ingenuity of the American populists and their ability to circumvent the US laws.
Arguably, the Olympic Committee is correct there.
Because they have an absolute right to that five rings symbol and it's not constrained in any way by likelihood, confusion, or anything else if it's being used in some sort of commercial A couple of years ago, there as a guide in Minnesota who started using hashtag and then various Olympic marks and claimed that the hashtag wasn't in the statute.
You know that the.
Statute it protects Olympics, it protects Olympiad. It doesn't protect hashtag Olympic, which I thought was very creative. Americans are just very ingenious when it comes to getting around laws.
I'm so sure he got a cease and desist letter. Thanks so much, Terry. That's intellectual property litigator Terrence Ross. And that's it for this edition of The Bloomberg Law Show. Remember you can always get the latest legal news on our Bloomberg Law Podcast. You can find them on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at www dot bloomberg dot com slash podcast Slash Law, And remember to tune into The Bloomberg Law Show every
weeknight at ten pm Wall Street Time. I'm June Grosso and you're listening to Bloomberg