So this is a disturbing story: A t-shirt producer who made an NSA parody T-Shirt (“The only part of government that actually listens”) incorporating the NSA logo was told by Zazzle that s/he couldn’t sell the shirt because the NSA had made a copyright claim. Zazzle sent the t-shirt creator this message:
Unfortunately, it appears that your product, “the nsa”, does not meet Zazzle Acceptable Content Guidelines. Specifically, your product contained content which infringes upon the intellectual property rights of National Security Agency.
We have been contacted by legal representatives from the National Security Agency, and at their request, have removed the product from the Zazzle Marketplace.
To me, that’s a pretty clear attempt to use intellectual property law for censorship purposes.
However, an update at the Daily Dot says:
NSA has not sent a cease and desist letter to Zazzle since March 2011 regarding a mug they were selling using the NSA Seal. At any time that NSA is made aware that the NSA Seal is being used without our permission, we will take appropriate actions.
1) I want to know what the mug looked like.
2) It seems that either Zazzle or the NSA is lying. I honestly don’t know which, although if I had to bet I’d bet on Zazzle, simply because it would be so incredibly stupid for the NSA to claim not to have sent a cease and desist letter if they actually had, since such a lie would be easily disproven. But who knows?
3) If the NSA is telling the truth, then did Zazzle pre-emptively take down the shirt to avoid the potential of an NSA cease and desist letter? That would be appalling, if so.
4) Given how clearly unconstitutional a takedown request from the NSA would be, even if the NSA did issue a takedown request, it’s appalling that Zazzle rolled over for it so easily. So Zazzle is appalling either way. (Note: I have some “leftycartoons” merchandise for sale on Zazzle. I chose Zazzle because they have t-shirts up to size 6x.)
5) I suppose both sides could be telling the lawyerly truth if the NSA sent some sort of takedown communication that was not, technically speaking, a “cease and desist” letter.
The NSA shirts are now available at Cafepress.
More on the legal details at Volokh.
Hm. This has become more personally applicable than I would have thought a week ago.
I went to Washington, D.C. for a professional conference this last week. A vendor whose network analysis software I use has a yearly conference for training, etc. My wife accompanied me. While I was at the conference she was walking around town seeing the sights. She had a great time.
As you may recall, there was a major celebration of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington on Wednesday. My wife attended it and sat on the ground in the rain listening to the speeches. We were staying at the Willard, just 3 blocks down from the White House. It’s a pretty historic place. President Lincoln stayed there, Presidents and Presidents-Elect have stayed there, apparently quite often.
Tuesday night we were on the elevator going up to our room and I turned to my wife and said “Something’s up.” The reason was that there was a young woman on the elevator wearing a non-tailored blue sport coat, shapeless black slacks and utilitarian men’s style black shoes. I figured that a young woman wearing that kind of ensemble is on the clock. She also had a small enameled pin on her lapel with a sheriff’s badge style star depicted on it.
I was right. When we got out of the elevator an identically attired older man (including the pin) was standing near the elevator door at the confluence of two hallways. There were cameras pointing down both hallways and two electronic sensors on either side of the hotel room door catercorner to ours. The gentleman readily admitted to being Secret Service but would not tell us who they were watching, except to say “You’ve probably never heard of him.” Subsequent discussions among other guests on the floor based on various observations of people coming and going reached a consensus that it was a President of an African nation.
So what are the odds that we had a room that close to someone being watched over by the Secret Service without having been checked out by some government agency or another? My wife said that she was worried that they’d stop her when she got out of the elevator. I told her “I’m sure they recognize you from your picture.” The State of Illinois keeps your drivers’ license picture on file. I know this for a fact because when I got my latest Firearms Owners Identification card from the State, it has a copy of my drivers’ license picture on it. Do you think that the State would send a copy of the Feds if they asked for it? If they even had to ask ….
That’s no surprise, RonF. Hell, there’s probably a photo of me at the 1980 No Nukes rally in Central Park. The question was always, “When will the government have the technology to analyze the massive amounts of data they collect for useful info?” It turns out that the answer is, “Sometime around 2003.”
Nothing is private and it seems like we’re pretty okay with that.
Remember to use the words, “bomb” and “nuclear” and “suitcase” in all of your correspondence (both written and oral). Or whatever combination of words it is that you’d like to make useless as a search string.
Although the OP seemed to be about copyright rather than surveillance, I can see how the tangent occurred.
Or Zazzle is using a canned response, since copyright issues usually arise when the copyright holder complains. This is particularly weird given that this is a government agency – the complaint would be “somebody might think this is from the NSA,” not, “you are infringing our property.”
I’m thinking that despite the law it’s unconstitutional for the government to copyright something created with public money.
…and I’m wondering how they can pull a parody item like this? The logo is clearly not from the NSA (peeping while you’re sleeping?) so how can they claim copyright infringement for any of this?
I’m thinking it’s likely that the NSA is telling the truth here (for the reasons Amp outlines) and that Zazzle pulled it so as to avoid the possibility of incurring their ire (and because they’re cowardly weenies).
That having been said, that’s not very exculpatory for the NSA, since “people don’t engage in legitimate speech because they don’t want to run the risk we might disapprove” IS THE FUCKING DEFINITION OF A CHILLING EFFECT.
“Oh, we didn’t tell them to take it down, we just have everyone so intimidated and terrified that they took it down on their own,” is a shitty defense.
—Myca
This:
I work for the fed . . . the general direction from my agency is that the taxpayers bought our work & data, they’re the “customer”, they own the information and can have whatever they like of it whenever they like it (with the exception of a few Freedom-of-Information-Act-exempt “predecisional” noodlings and private personnel info). I don’t understand how NSA can say their logo and name are off-limits to public use.
I don’t understand how NSA can say their logo and name are off-limits to public use.
The NSA didn’t quite say that. But if you’ve ever gotten a very official-looking scam letter, you can see why government agencies have a policy other than “use our logo for whatever.”
“… IS THE FUCKING DEFINITION OF A CHILLING EFFECT.”
Not to mention “We will use your money to hire more lawyers than you yourself can afford, so it doesn’t really matter what the law says, does it?”
I dunno Mythago . . . seems like they said (well apparently said) something pretty close (from that Volokh link):
. . . and that is what P.L. 86-36 actually says! wow. Now I’m probably going to be on a watchlist somewhere for googling P.L. 86-36 =p
well, ok, here’s what the law actually says, which is much more reasonable:
the letter apparently from the NSA implies something different.
RonF is correct; creations of the federal government (and of government employees doing their jobs) are in the public domain. (There’s a gigantic category on Wikimedia Commons, which includes the official NSA seal.) There’s definitely no valid copyright-based claim to complain about using the seal. Maybe they can make some claims about illegally representing yourself as the NSA, but that’s certainly not going on here.
It’s very easy to make spurious claims of copyright, and unless you have legal staff, they can be pretty spooky.
marmalade @10, I’d like to see the entire statement they released to the Daily Dot; it seems very odd to me if that single, context-free paragraph was the entirety of what the NSA said.
In any case, it really does not seem as though Zazzle is telling the truth here.
Pingback: You Can't Read That! | Paul's Thing