The Pan Am Games Tried To Stop People From Linking To Its Website

Good luck with that.

The Pan Am games are underway in Toronto and the organizers are very serious about protecting their brand.

USA Today Sports / Reuters

A paragraph in the Pan Am website's terms of use forbid linking to it without written consent from game organizers.

Pan Am / Via toronto2015.org

Which is about as unenforceable as it sounds.

Google

The Register, a UK tech news site, noticed the linking rule amid the "incomprehensible legalese" and concluded that "Toronto2015.org lawyers appear confused by this internet thingy."

Being manners-minded Brits, they requested permission to link to the website.

Dear Pan Am Games lawyers,

Welcome to the internet.

We would like to seek permission to link to your website for a story we are writing about how ludicrous it is that you are requesting people to ask permission to link to your site.

And got this response.

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently: [e-mail]. Technical details of permanent failure…

The organizers have also trademarked "TO2015," which is a popular hashtag for the games.

Metro / Via metronews.ca

So, technically, using TO2015 without permission to use TO2015 from the people interested in protecting TO2015 could land you in trouble for using TO2015.

However, as Metro pointed out in April, the TO2015 protection is mostly to stop brands not associated with TO2015 from using TO2015 if they're not official sponsors of TO2015.

As of Monday, Pan Am appears to have realized that asking people not to link to the website of a major sporting event would only lead to mockery. Now, they just forbid using or embedding the site's content.

Pan Am / Via toronto2015.org

BuzzFeed Canada could not locate any embeddable content on the TO2015 website.

For more information about the games, including the official mascot, medal counts or schedules, go here, here, here, or here.