VancouverSun- The Vancouver Canucks won’t return to the ice until next month, but when it comes to protecting their copyright, the franchise has no offseason.
Their latest opponent is a pick-up team at this weekend’s Top Cheese three-on-three youth lacrosse exhibition in Langley. The team, which has no formal name and is comprised of just four pre-teen boys, was planning to wear a customized jersey featuring a modified version of the Johnny Canuck logo carrying a lacrosse stick. The boys were going to be participating in a “fun day” event organized by a youth academy run by the Vancouver Stealth, the local National Lacrosse League team recently purchased by the Canucks. Participants dress up in silly clothes or made-up uniforms for an informal, day-long tournament. The jerseys in question made the rounds on social media earlier in the week, leading some to speculate online that the design might be a sneak peek of the sweaters for a re-branded Stealth team, which will begin its season under Canucks Sports & Entertainment ownership in December. But the Canucks shut that speculation down in a hurry, demanding that the unsanctioned jerseys be turned over to the franchise upon completion of the tournament. “I hear that now that the Canucks want the jersey back,” said Rob, a father who commissioned the uniforms from Port Coquitlam’s Xtreme Threads and paid roughly $1000 for their creation. He declined to give his last name out of concern that the Canucks might target him legally, an expensive process he can’t afford. “It’s a fun tournament,” he said. “They want (the jerseys) back to destroy them. No way, shape or form am I looking to profit anything from this, or looking to take any money from this,” he said. “It was done because my son came to me and wanted to put a team together for this tournament.” Reached for comment by Postmedia, Canucks Sports & Entertainment said the lacrosse jerseys “created confusion”. “We were made aware that a local jersey company created and supplied jerseys for a team to participate in a weekend lacrosse tournament,” said the organization. “While we applaud the ingenuity of the fan that suggested the concept, the company did not have the right to use either the Johnny Canuck or Stealth trade-marks in the design. The use has created confusion as we are heading into a team and logo launch for Vancouver’s new National Lacrosse League Team.” -------- I suppose it's important to start by saying that I know the business of sports to be a cutthroat one, and thus the protection of any and all copyrights as a part of such is more likely to make Donald Trump's dream scenario for border patrol seem lenient by comparison. As over-the-top as confiscating custom lacrosse jerseys following an otherwise meaningless youth tournament may seem, Canucks Sports & Entertainment is just doing their job by attempting to do so. That being said, in a way fitting of a bouncer who strictly enforces the dress code in taking out his frustrations with his line of work on drunk 20-somethings in sneakers, I can't help but feel like the Canucks' entire operation would be a lot more likely to let something like this slide if they were comfortable with where they were at as a franchise. Hurt people hurt people, and no one is hurting more than an organization that couldn't leverage the emergence of the league's best rookie goal scorer into even one single nationally broadcasted game during his sophomore season. Playing the bad guy is in the job description of those enlisted to maintain the license of professional sports logos, but I'd imagine the pettiness has been ramped up the amount of pessimism they are surrounded by. Simply put, those lacrosse jerseys might not be causing such a stir if they weren't currently scheduled to get as much NBC airtime as the franchise they were derived from. They can hide behind the "confusion" caused amongst a community of lax fans that's compact enough to clear it up themselves with couple retweets, but the truth is that you hardly ever see unfavorable headlines that are wildly unnecessary trailing alongside good teams. All this story did was remind me that the Canucks even had ownership over some super Canadian stereotype that, despite appearing workmanlike, couldn't earn a promotion over a largely irrelevant orca or an elementary illustration of a hockey stick. In essence, giving their cock a courtesy shake in raining on the parade of a handful of kids that, against all odds, actually want to let it be known that they are still Canucks' fans does more harm than good. Any team that wasn't made shortsighted by sucking (as a result of being made to suck by shortsightedness) probably would have realized that this was an impossible battle to win publicly. Unfortunately, the practice of projecting isn't just a thing that has people prematurely penciling Jack Hughes into Vancouver's 2019-2020 lineup.
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