The August 1 edition of the Wall Street Journal reports that organizers of competitions involving animals, robots, and even body parts have been changing their names to avoid "infringing" the trademarked name "Olympics."

The Ferret Olympics is now the Ferret Agility Trials; the Raw Olympics and Rawlympics are now the Raw Games.

America's only native criminal class (i.e., Congress) passed a statute in 1978 giving the U.S. Olympic Committee a monopoly on the word "Olympic" and a few other words. This was buttressed by a 1987 SCOTUS ruling.

The USOC is trying to prevent "ambush marketing." Its lawyers think that people organizing races by ferrets and such will undermine its profitability. If ever there were an example of what Ludwig von Mises called the Montaigne fallacy (seeing the market as a zero-sum game with someone's profits causing someone else's losses), this is it.