Because You Want to Book Club #11: "Brand Name Bullies"

I am a writer and an artist who often uses copyrighted material protected under the Free Use Act to prove or illustrate a point I have made. I am well aware of the laws and I only use clips that can be used in a critical fashion. I do know there are corporations out there that will try to take you to court over pretty much anything in order to protect their trademarks no matter how ridiculous they might be.

McDonalds has trademarked over 150 common everyday words and phrases, and technically if you get caught using them without crediting the owner, they could take you to court (although they have yet to really do so). They also have tried to shut down any restaurants, no matter how European they might be, that use the “Mc” prefix in their name; even if it is named after the owner. Ralph Lauren owns the rights to the word “Polo.” The sport can’t even legally call itself polo anymore without first running anything they do past the Lauren legal department. Mattel and Disney constantly sue people on a regular basis for using characters they created (or in the cases of Barbie and Mickey Mouse possibly stole) in any light that could be looked at as disparaging. Fox News is the only news channel that can say they are “fair and balanced” because they bought the phrase outright.

None of the companies I just mentioned ever really win the lawsuits they present to courts. They don’t care about the merits of their lawsuits and they care even less about the outcomes. In big business this is just seen as another business expense. The reason: they want to bully people. The corporate, and even the private world, have become trademark crazy; mostly because it is simple to do and can make rich people even richer.

David Bollier presents these stories and many others in his book “Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture.” Bollier is one of the founders of Public Knowledge, which aims to make people aware of their rights in the new global and digital economies. Bollier makes great cases for overturning the current laws that allow you to pretty much copyright everything indefinitely and put more works into “public domain.” He also illustrates, quite humorously, just how ridiculous these lawsuits really are.

The book is not only amusing, but also a terribly important for any artist to read and understand. It doesn’t really matter how much money you have, you can always stand up to a corporate giant, mostly because for all the effort they put into a case, they simply expect you to roll over and either pay them or stop what you are doing. It is far from being a hard book to understand, which makes it accessible to almost anyone looking to further their social consciousness.

I would quite directly from the book, but in the one paradox or possibly as a joke, the opening pages state that no portion of the book may be reproduced in any way; not even for critical reasons without agreeing to or paying the author and publisher a fee. It is the one thing in the book that I can’t for the life of me understand.

Grade: A-