Can you trademark “winter”?

I had to look at the date of this article in IHT, but it unfortunately didn’t say April 1st. Turns out that the Canadian governement is proposing to change the law to grant the organizing committee of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games the rights to common words like “winter”, “gold”, “silver”, “medals”, “sponsor”, “games”, “21st” and “2010″. The article says that journalists are exempted from the law, but will bloggers get the green light too? Probably not, if the IOC has the same anti-blog attitude as in the past.

[Via Dennis.]