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Faced with allegations of plagiarism, the Tokyo Organizing Committee for the 2020 Olympics has withdrawn its chosen logo for the summer games.
The logo, created by Japanese graphic designer Kenjiro Sano, features a set of geometric shapes built to form a 'T.' Unfortunately for Sano and the committee, so does this logo, which Belgian designer Olivier Debie created for the Théâtre de Liège in Belgium. Just five weeks after Tokyo rolled out its logo, Debie published this animated loop on Twitter and Facebook, along with the not-so-subtle suggestion that Sano ripped off his work.
Things got dicey after that. Cases of copyright infringement are rarely cut and dry, and that's especially true with graphic design, where its creators are tasked with trying to legal claim and protect abstracted, geometric shapes and lines. It's hard to own a square.
Although Debie never registered a trademark for his design, he went ahead with threats of legal action against the committee. Sano said in a press conference that he had never seen Debie's logo, and Toshiro Muto, director-general of the Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, said he stood by the originality of Sano's design. Then, according to The Wall Street Journal, the Organizing Committee caught wind of similarities between Sano's original design and a poster created for an exhibit on the work of German typographer Jan Tschichold. This week, the committee decided by a vote to pull the plug, and save some face. They are now going back to the drawing board.
This is the second design-related fire the Tokyo 2020 Olympics Committee has had to put out. Earlier in July, well before the logo controversy, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced that work would halt on Zaha Hadid's $2 billion stadium, and that the committee would be starting from scratch.
