When you're in the smear business you have to keep moving on to the next big thing. But when someone starts throwing mud back at you there's not much you can do. MoveOn can dish out lies and distort anything they wish but if something comes back at them they crawl in the corner like little school children. It seems people have been taking it upon themselves to make shirts and such on cafepress.com to show their disdain. Seems fair enough, if they're allowed to slander our troops are we not allowed to slander them?
Their lawyers don't think so.
Last week it demanded that the site remove eight items, arguing that they violated MoveOn’s merchandising trademarks.
Trademark law doesn’t confer monopoly rights over all uses of a registered phrase or symbol, however, and it wasn’t created simply to protect the trademark owner’s interests. Instead, it’s designed to protect consumers against being misled or confused about brands. The courts have repeatedly ruled in favor of parodies and critiques; that’s why www.famousbrandnamesucks.com doesn’t violate famousbrandname’s trademark. And most, if not all, of the items targeted by MoveOn were clearly designed to razz it, not to trick buyers into thinking they were the group’s products.Beyond that, it’s amazing that MoveOn would try to squelch political speech.
How sad! You are so pathetic that you are fighting against the same thing you survive off of!? Moveon, if you can't handle the heat maybe you should, well, move on. Here is what CafePress had to say about it.
“While we understand that negative commentary is unsavory, our shopkeepers’ parodies of the MoveOn.org trademark are permissible here, especially when one considers the First Amendment implications raised by the social and political importance of your organization, the policies it advocates, and the countervailing messages conveyed by the parodies,” wrote Daniel Pontes of CafePress to Carrie Olson, MoveOn’s chief operating officer. Olson had been the one requesting the takedown.
Looking on cafepress it seems that a lot of people are removing their items. So to start things moving I am going to do my part by creating some t-shirts. Yeah I'll make like a dollar a piece but it's more about making a point than anything. If you would like to take part in this little charade email me your images (admin[@]thedailyconservative.net) and I'll throw them on t-shirts. Either way check out my store over at printfection and enjoy slandering the slanderers.
