Maybe it’s a case of overzealous lawyering, but the legalese on the official Pan Am Games website states that no one is allowed to link to it without written permission.

“Links to this Site are not permitted except with the written consent of TO2015™. If you wish to link to the Site, you must submit a written request to TO2015™ to do so,” the toronto2015.org Terms of Use say.*

That’s a cause for concern, said Fenwick McKelvey an assistant professor communication studies at Concordia University who specializes in the internet.

“This is a public event. It’s publicly funded. It’s going to generate public discussion and the fact that they claim they can say how people are discussing it, or linking to the content, is a tremendous overreach,” he said.

McKelvey said Canadian courts recognize that linking as part of freedom of speech, and this runs contrary to that.

McKelvey said TO2015 didn’t take the technical steps to prevent search engines from crawling, indexing and automatically linking to the site, so, in effect, it has allowed Google to automatically violate those terms.

Catherine Lovrics, a lawyer with Bereskin & Parr who specializes in new media/copyright, took a look at the legal terms for Metro and confirmed that they claim a requirement of blanket written permission to link to the site, and website terms such as these are generally legally enforceable.

However, Lovrics said the terms are likely not aimed at regular social media users, or Google, but brands.

“If you’re linking on your social media page to your favourite bowler and the fact that they won a bowling event, I don’t think that these terms are likely going to be enforced and there’s no reason to worry,” she said. “But, if you’re trying to use the Pan Am Games commercially and you’re not an official sponsor, this is probably aimed at you.”

Lovrics said the terms are written more broadly, likely to give the Games legal leeway to take action if there’s a link in a context they didn’t like, that’s not purely commercial.

If that’s a link in a context that’s just critical of the Games, but not commercial in nature, it would be up to TO2015 about whether they’d want to take action, she said. “I would think there is some freedom of expression there that should be tolerated, but it’s not my call to make.”

Pan Am organizers have taken other steps to protect sponsorships, including trademarking To2015, a popular hashtag for the Games.

TO2015 responded to Metro’s questions about this issue by stating, “Permission to link to our website is requested as a way to protect our intellectual property assets.”