Seattle Times, Brands Complain Over Senate Campaign Ad That Is Clearly Protected Speech
from the c'mon-guys dept
There is something about when corporate brands get used in political advertisements that seems to make everybody forget about the very concept of fair use or international equivalents. One previous example would be when a bunch of foodstuff brands claimed trademark infringement over an anti-littering campaign in Canada, arguing that the use of their own packaging in photographs was somehow a trademark violation. It wasn’t, but that particular city campaign caved anyway.
But this all gets way more frustrating when an organization that depends on the First Amendment to exist decides to ignore its primacy over a political ad. And that is exactly what happened between the Seattle Times newspaper and Tiffany Smiley, who is running for the Senate in Washington. The Times, along with Starbucks and the Seattle Seahawks, complained about an ad described below. The Times went so far as to send a cease and desist notice to Smiley’s campaign.
In the challenged 30-second campaign ad, Smiley begins by pointing to a shuttered Seattle Starbucks and saying, “These doors are closed because it’s too dangerous to ask employees to work here anymore.” Then, while she says that opponent Murray has “spearheaded reckless policies,” the Seattle Times logo and headline appear, saying, “Seattle’s Awful August Shows the City Continues to Backslide on Crime.”
Similarly, when Smiley complains that the city is suffering from “so much crime that you can’t even get a cup of coffee from the hometown shop on Capitol Hill, even if you can still afford it,” another Times headline appears that underscores her point. This one reads, “Starbucks to Close 5 Seattle Stores Over Safety Concerns.”
This is 100% a textbook case of fair use. And the Seattle Times should know that. Does know that. Certainly whatever lawyer crafted the C&D knows that. The branding was used as part of political speech and they were accurately represented in the advertisement. Smiley is also not competing with any of those brands. The Times complaint was that it had actually endorsed Smiley’s opponent and suggested the use in the advertisement implied an endorsement from the Times. But it doesn’t. At all.
And regardless, this all still amounts to protected speech.
Joel Ard is a Washington state-based lawyer who has experience with intellectual property and fair use law. After viewing the ads, he told The Center Square Thursday in a phone interview, “It’s so blatantly fair use that if someone wanted to make this claim in federal court, they’d likely be sanctioned for it.”
Uh huh. And the real headache-inducing part of this whole story is that the complaint is coming from a newspaper that absolutely relies on the First Amendment and fair use to do what it does. Would the Times like this flipped around? Should the Smiley campaign be able to control when its candidate appears in the paper? Should it be able to keep the paper’s website from showing Smiley’s political ads and commenting on them?
Of course not! But Smiley’s speech is every bit as protected as the Seattle Times’. And while I normally roll my eyes when politicians claim media bias in most circumstances, when Smiley says this…
“While unfair and bias reporting and commentary is likely protected by the First Amendment…that speech protection does not apply to providing corporate resources to a campaign,” explained the complaint letter to the FEC by Charlie Spies and Katie Reynolds, co-counsel for the Smiley for Washington campaign. “What is illegal is for [the Seattle Times] to provide its resources to Patty Murray, and her campaign committee People for Patty Murray, while at the same time denying such resources to her opponent.”
…it’s kind of hard to argue she doesn’t have a point. Her opponent, Murray, also uses Seattle Times branding in her ads without complaint.
Yeesh, folks, you’re a newspaper. Be better than this.
Filed Under: fair use, political ads, political speech, tiffany smiley, trademark
Companies: seattle times
Comments on “Seattle Times, Brands Complain Over Senate Campaign Ad That Is Clearly Protected Speech”
You might also bring up that Smiley is also running ads claiming that 87,000 IRS agents are coming after Americans because of Biden, among other lies.
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That’s irrelevant to the core thesis of the article, which is that the Seattle Times should have known better than to go after legally protected speech because it doesn’t like the speaker.
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You replied to an advertising bot that quoted an out of context sentence fragment from another post, the full text of which did actually point out that they should not be using trademark law for this, since if they did have a genuine case for a complaint against them it would be on other grounds.
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Huh, I am seeing this one nested under the comment by Koby which was posted 6 hours after this reply was apparently posted.
So here’s the question that immediately came to my mind. What in fact was the substance of the article attached to that headline they used?
Because if it was in fact about the thing the campaign is claiming, then perhaps if the Times have a problem with it, they need to check their own reporting and any hyperbole they may employ in order to get eyes on their product. If it was in fact a distortion by using it out of context to suggest the Times had made claims they did not, for example, if the article was about Starbucks themselves not providing safe working environments due to dangerous wiring or whatever, rather than employees being unsafe due to crime, then they may have other avenues to approach, without resorting to a clearly ungrounded abuse of trademark law
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Re; Seattle Times, Brands Complain Over Senate Campaign Ad That Is Clearly Protected Speech
Distortion by using it out of context to suggest the Times had made claims they did not, for example, if the article was about Starbucks themselves not providing safe working environments due to dangerous wiring or whatever.
https://www.aetna-medicare.org/
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Oooh interesting, the bots now quote snippets of random text from real people’s posts.
Can we get them to quote each other?
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nice blog
very intersting blog thanks for sharing
Yes to all of them.
Starbucks et al would LOVE to turn the Seattle Times into their willing whore. Smiley and Murray would fucking love it if they could deny 1A to their opponents.
Just making the unspoken spoken, folks. After all, everyone nowadays want to be totalitarian states because they “provide a working government”.
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I suggest you go and talk to all the Russians who have left Russia recently.
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Way ahead of you. I know.
Even without the shitshow that is Russia (and the Balkan clapback, which will be violent), that still leaves us with… China, Singapore and India.
Though calling India “successful” might be a stretch. And while we all know these countries are going to get fucked hard, the people in power and a lot of frustrated Americans AND at least quite a few Russians would rather their nations follow Singapore and China.
The perception is more important than reality.
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Activist Over Journalist
In the election cycle 6 years ago, we saw how musicians sought to deny usage to politicians that they disliked. This is merely an extension. Tiffany Smiley committed the cardinal sin of using a left wing publication to criticize another left-winger. That should be no surprise. The mistake here is to consider the Seattle Times to be a noble institution by labeling them a “newspaper”, when they’re actually just activists.
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Journalists are supposed to be activists. A completely passive reporter of everything without any critical analysis of it or active attempt to expose the truth of the matter is not a journalist, they’re a stenographer.
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Or propagandists, depending of the country they’re from.
An off-topic observation, but....
Has anyone noticed the comments section appears to have gone completely nonsensical in the last few days, with comments no longer displaying coherently nested, and sometimes appearing to be nested under wholly different comments to the ones they are replying to? I’m seeing responses all over the place in no seeming order, and my own replies it’s random if they appear nested next to the comment I was replying to or on their own, or nested under something else.
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Have clicked “View in chronology” by mistake perhaps? If you have it says “View in thread” below the posts – click that and everything should be back to normal.
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I have it threaded but the threads randomly change every time I refresh the page, it’s quite odd.
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They’re definitely not displaying chronologically, that’s for sure, since there are both higher and lower numbers both above and below posts for different times on the same day.
The most disturbing part of the story is that a Senate candidate doesn’t know the difference between “bias” and “biased”.
Time for Democrats to go
Starting with Patty Murray, who for 30 years in the senate apparently on has lowering drug prices as her accomplishment, and she didn’t even do that. Time to step aside.