Pen-Elayne on the Web

Spotlight on Micah

As promised, I followed up with Micah Wright regarding yesterday's blog entry, and here's his response. He gave me permission to repost it here.

The beautiful thing about the posters created by the Office of Wartime Information is that our grandparents paid for them all through their taxes. The artwork on those posters was work-for-hire for Uncle Sam.

In other words, they're all in the Public Domain. Even the Norman Rockwell.

I know, a crazy thing, considering the stupid lengths that AOLTimeWarnUniDisSonyFox™ are going through to destroy the Public Domain, but it's true. All of the copyright extension laws in the world can't change the fact that those posters were created for the government and therefore belong to the American people. In addition, there is a strong First Amendment-derived parody law in this country which is supposed to protect the so obviously political speech that I'm creating with the revamps.

When I started the project, I had no idea what the status of the copyright on these posters was and I didn't especially care... I knew the parody laws would cover what I was doing so long as I didn't sell any of the merchandise. It was only four months after I had the remix project up and running that I got into an email conversation with a professor at the University of Minnesota (who curates one of the largest collections of these posters in existence) and he told me that I should sell posters & t-shirts because the work is in the public domain. I did a little research and voila, he was correct.

[In my opinion Kieron Dwyer] should have never sold any of the products with the Starbucks logo on it. Making the logo and printing it in a magazine were both fine and would have been clearly covered by Free Speech/Political Speech/Parody laws, but he went the extra mile and sold t-shirts and stickers and that's what doomed him. It was suddenly Commercial Speech, not Political Speech. Simply selling a comic book is not commercial speech... after all, newspapers had to be sold in order for Thomas Nast's great political cartoons of Boss Tweed to be circulated. Parody and Free Speech laws cover the distribution of said political parody... they just don't cover you when you sell t-shirts of it.

Personally, I feel that corporations have way too much power in this culture already and that they should never have their obviously commercial speech rights trump the small guy's political/commercial speech, but I bow to the law of the land. In insisting that Dwyer never sell his comic book, however, I think they made a major misstep, one that resulted in their crossing the line from cracking down on the copyright infringement into censorship of Dwyer's political speech...

[Re:] Stu Helm. I think Kraft's position was an extreme one, but one within their rights. This falls into the "Disney Sues Childcare Center for Having Bambi Mural on Wall" type of corporate lawsuit excess category in my opinion, but that said, from what I've seen of Helms' work, these guys have every right to be pissed off that he's using their trademark... he in no way disguised or changed it. Velveda is an astoundingly made-up word... it wasn't like he was calling himself "king cheese" and they went after him because they believe that they own cheese and macaroni. He was stupid and he deserves what he gets (up to a certain point).

Adbusters, Wacky Packs and Garbage Pail kids all fall under fair usage parody laws territory, by the way. It's even legal to make money from them since they are so obviously parody. I'd love to see someone try and sue Adbusters... that would be like Corporate Vietnam. The Adbuster guys would sit in their caves, laughing and eating rats long after the corporations had spent themselves into the grave trying to stamp them out. I love the smell of Napalm in the morning.

Aside from disagreeing with Micah about likening the use of a trademark to sell porn to painting a Bambi mural on a childcare center, I'm pretty much in Micah's court here, and I found the response regarding the posters to be absolutely fascinating. Hope you agree.

[By the way, a propos of nothing, I think I found a new definition for "heterosexual male secure in his manhood," as Robin and I immediately switched from the end of yesterday's Super Bowl to watching the Gay Weddings marathon on Bravo.]