Thoughts on trademark infringement…
Not many people can look at a wall full of children’s art and wax philosophic about copyright and trademark law, can they?
The local shopping mall has a couple of walls covered in tiles that were painted by local children. The tiles have a definite pattern to them – you’ll find lots of the standard kiddie portraits of their favorite pets or their moms or dads, a scattering of multi-colored peace signs, and a handful of variations on the yin-yang. Some of the kids are even experimenting with abstract imagery, playing with line and color without creating a representative image.
And in the middle of looking at the tiles, I came across a tile that one kid had completely filled with the Bat-signal.
And I chuckled. Because there’s no way in Heck that anybody would ever consider telling a kid that his tile wasn’t going up on the wall because it contained obvious trademark infringement.
So here’s what occurred to me.
When we’re young, corporations spend billions upon billions of dollars to fill our heads with their imagery. Corporate logos are slapped on toys, distributed on t-shirts, and flashed on the screens during commercial breaks for our favorite shows. This conditioning is supposed to turn us into good little consumers later in life as we come to associate things like the Golden Arches with fond memories and feel a loyalty to the image as we would toward an old friend.
And, in fact, the sale is so successful that we reach a point where our individual systems of iconography become encoded with the images we have been sold. When called upon to create self-expression, we follow our passions – and our passions are in the images we have been sold. Our personal iconography which is meant to help us express ourselves to the world becomes filled with – and, in some cases, completely composed of – the icons of everyday commerce, and when we create these images we are praised for expressing our passions and our work is proudly displayed in public.
As we grow older, however, our iconography remains the same. We build off of what we already know and we continue to express ourselves with the imagery that has meaning to us.
But without the defense of our youth, we are told that our iconography that we built over the years is no longer available to us. Putting the Golden Arches on our wall gets a cease-and-desist order from the McDonalds corporation. Putting the Bat-Signal on a T-shirt results in a lawsuit from Warner Bros. And let’s not even consider the ramifications of sticking Mickey ears on your head in Photoshop.
And the imagery introduced to us in our later life is just as controlled – the Starbucks mermaid, the multi-colored apple with the bite taken out of the side, a bunny in a bowtie are all images that we are bombarded with and expected to make a significant part of our lives, and yet we are not free to use them to express ourselves.
Just some thoughts. To the kids in elementary school out there, you won’t always be able to fly your Bat-Signal proud. Enjoy your cultural freedom while it lasts, and consider bolstering it with images that aren’t associated with cheeseburgers and fries – those will come in handy later.