Interesting. I am not completely grasping the purpose of a prohibition on a race using an existing currently certified course while placing its own name on the map.
If Sam's Restaurant, say, holds a spring 10K on a course certified for Dave's Restaurant's fall 10K, Dave's Restaurant can't really do anything to stop Sam's - right? If Sam's wants to work within our rules, would we then say that Sam's must obtain its own certification for the exact same course? Are there extant instances of this in our database?
By offering our certified course maps, even of expired courses, to the general public, it seems to me we are in fact giving up control of how they are used. If one of the race directors who is asked to remove the new race name from the certification map simply ignores this request by USATF, we can't practically do anything about it - right? Does USATF Legal have some blanket copyright restriction in force for all certified courses? Even if we were to add language to each certification map such as "Copyright 2023, USATF.org", what would this accomplish?
Not asking because I want to be the devil's advocate here. I just have questions about the purpose and the efficacy of this policy. In Washington, D.C., after 9-11-2001, the streets that can be made available for races in the downtown and the federal complex were severely restricted by the authorities. Most of the certified courses in this entire area went away, except for some that are completely within National Park Service properties. Even the Army Ten Miler and the Marine Corps Marathon were forced to change their courses to comply with the new rules. Only a single 5K was allowed in the Pennsylvania Avenue corridor - in the space between Freedom Plaza near the White House and our U.S. Capitol.
Since this restriction was enacted, several medium-to-large footraces stage their annual event on this one remaining course. A few that I know of: Cherry Blossom 5K, Purple Stride 5K, Race For Hope 5K, Race For Every Child 5K. All of these events take Bob Thurston's certification map and create their own version of it with their event name and the certification number on it. If Bob has any problem with this - actually I am almost certain he doesn't - I doubt he is likely to ask any RD to change their customized course map.
If the USATF policy can thus be ignored, I am still wondering what we want to accomplish with a restriction on "re-mapping" or "re-branding" our certified courses. I hope no one in USATF is contemplating some kind of enforcement of this rule. I think that could be quite unpopular. A more useful endeavor in my way of thinking is for us to establish national minimum fees for course certification that take into account the labor and skill to establish and renew cal courses, to measure, and to create good quality course maps. Then, we can ask RDs who want to re-brand a certification map to pay the original client part of the cost of the certification. And they can still ignore our requests. I for one am OK with this.