Freedom of Expression®
Coolmac
Date:
15/08/2005
In 1998, the term Freedom of Expression® was trademarked by Kembrew McLeod. He did this as a demonstration of how intellectual property law is being abused and used to restrict our Freedom of Speech®. Huge corporations are registering trademarks on every day expressions, and scarily, their legal teams appear to be very eager to sue.
Now I bet some of you might laugh, you can't be sued for using every day expressions! Well you can; the corporate lawyers may not win the case, but they can drag you into court, and that is going to cost you money and a whole lot of stress. An example from the introduction of McLeod's new book, Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity, is when Fox news sued satirist Al Franken over the title of his book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Why was he sued? He was sued because Fox have trademarked Fair and Balanced. Thankfully the case was laughed out of court, but Fox went on to threaten a web site selling satirical t-shirts as well as The Simpsons (Which airs on its sister network!).
I used to laugh at science fiction books and movies predicting a corporate owned future, where your rights as an individual were completely controlled and owned by corporate interests. It seems however that those corporations read the same books and instead thought to themselves, what a great idea! They abuse intellectual property law to the absolute maximum, attempting to apply it in places and situations where these laws were never meant to apply. They use terms such as "blur and tarnish", attempting to silence satire and any voice that might stand against them. Freedom of Expression® is a term they hate, it is something used by free thinking individuals, and free thinking individuals make bad customers.
Creativecommons.org has an interview with McLeod about his latest book as well as a documentary he is currently involved with. If you'd like to read the book for free, it is downloadable from McLeod's web site under a creative commons license.
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