Lawyers for the Los Angeles Police Department’s private foundation threatened a clothing company selling a “Fuck the LAPD” shirt, claiming that the union owns the copyright to the letters “LAPD” and asking that the shirt be taken off of the company’s store immediately. Lawyers for the clothing company, called Cola, responded with a letter that read, in its entirety, “LOL, no.”
The shirts read “FUCK THE LAPD” emblazoned over a basketball, which is a play on the Los Angeles Lakers logo. Cola told me that they founded the company in 2019 “to counteract US mythology with simple visual statements.”
“Two prime examples of this are my Afghan Spring tee (re: making the world safe for democracy) and my Death to Destiny tee, which revises the white-supremacist American Progress painting by substituting the grim reaper for Columbia, thereby telling the truth about settler expansion,” they added.
The threat was sent by IMG Worldwide, a giant entertainment and sports agency, on behalf of the Los Angeles Police Foundation, which is the name of a private foundation that the Los Angeles Times calls “the LAPD’s secretive, multimillion-dollar private funding arm.” The LAPF has purchased surveillance tech, robots, drones, and Palantir licenses for the LAPD.
“LAPF is one of two exclusive holders of intellectual property rights pertaining to trademarks, copyrights, and other licensed indicia for (a) the Los Angeles Police Department Badge; (b) the Los Angeles Police Department Uniform; (c) the LAPD motto ‘To Protect and Serve’; and (d) the word ‘LAPD’ as an acronym/abbreviation for the Los Angeles Police Department,” the letter reads. “Through extensive advertising, promotion and the substantial sale of a full range of licensed products embodying and pertaining to the LAPD IP, the LAPD IP has become famous throughout the world; and as such, carries immeasurable value to LAPF.”
The LAPF does have a store, which sells “Thin Blue Line” helicopter t-shirts, “bullet ornaments,” challenge coins, mouse pads, LAPD-branded surfboard coins with guns for fins, a $105 ashtray, and a host of other LAPD-branded merch. This is beside the point, however, because the LAPF does not and cannot own the letters “LAPD.” Even if it did own the letters “LAPD,” which it does not, there is a gigantic carveout in copyright law that allows for the use of copyrighted works “for purposes such as criticism [and] comment,” and there is also a carveout in trademark law for parody and criticism.
But, again, it does not own the letters LAPD. In fact, the “LAPD” is a taxpayer-funded government organization whose works are part of the public domain, meaning there are no copyright restrictions on them. There are some restrictions on using government logos in ways that deceive people (NASA’s page on this is pretty good), but these are not copyright related and they also deal specifically with using an agency’s logo and not the mere concept of using the letters that make up the agency’s name. There is also a legal case where the NSA tried to get people to stop using variations of its logos as a criticism, and had to settle.
It seems likely that the LAPF knows this but sent this letter simply to try to intimidate Cola. Parker Higgins, a copyright expert, called this a “nastygram” because it does not actually cite any specific laws nor does it actually make any “demands,” because it “request[s] that you remove or disable access to the above-mentioned materials and their corresponding URLs as they appear on your services in as expedient a manner as possible.”
“The correct response is to laugh at it,” Higgins said. “The tragedy is that some folks are going to be intimidated by it anyway.”
For now, Cola is not selling any more “Fuck the LAPD” shirts because they sold out: “This design is no longer in stock,” Cola said. “I might do more Fuck the LAPD pieces but in a different design. This design was available in tees. I have some F the LAPD stickers that I’m including free in orders but no more merch.”
IMG, the LAPD, and the LAPF did not respond to requests for comment.
https://www.404media.co/lol-no-maker-of-fuck-the-lapd-shirt-laughs-at-cops-copyright-threat/
