The Elephant in the Room

Cafe Press shirt titled "I Smell a Democrap." ...clever.

I’ve been wondering when there would be a big trademark kerfuffle concerning Cafe Press, and I think the fact that there hasn’t been so far says something good about their legal team and attempts to police their user base for infringement. But here it is, finally, and who’s yelling fire? The Republicans!

Of course, what I think is pretty amusing about the whole thing is that whereas the Republican party does own the trademarks to “GOP,” “Grand Old Party,” “Republican National Committee,” “RNC” and the official GOP elephant logo, it’s not as if it’s for the purpose of making money. If someone wants to put the Republican logo on a shirt, the majority of the time it’s because they want to show their pride as a Republican. You know that I call that? FREE ADVERTISING. Or at least, free campaigning. I mean, there’s a reason that candidates give out bumper stickers for free, right?

According to Wired blogs, the Cafe Press attorneys are making that exact point. If you look through the site, yes, there are some products that use the GOP trademarks in a critical way, but most are positive. (In the example above that I found with a quick search, we actually have a positive use of the Republican trademark and a negative use of the Democrat one.)

Does this matter? Legally, probably not. I expect Cafe Press will just end up taking down the infringing materials. I just don’t get why the Republican party chose this particular battle to fight. Isn’t there a bigger one going on right now?