The latest silly story on the ‘intellectual property’ scene comes from the Ford Motor Company, whose lawyers have blocked the production of the 2008 BMC calendar. BMC stands for the Black Mustang Club, a misguided organisation that has some kind of perverted interest in spewing out carbon dioxide using hardware that Ford produces.
A law firm representing Ford has blocked not only blocked production of the calendar on the basis that it infringes on Ford’s trademarks by the use of images of Ford cars, but it has also claimed it owns the rights of all the various images, logos and designs made for the BMC, as well as any pictures anyone may have made of a Ford car.
Of course, this claim will have great consequence for photography. Take a look t that great Walker Evans classic, American Photographs, and you will find a number of images in which cars, probably largely Fords, play a key role. One is parked outside a barber shop:
and in the next plate another is central outside the Cherokee Parts Store,
then comes the main street of Alabama’s county seat lined by autos,
and the little set of 4 images finishes with a neatly parked line along the wet main street of Saratoga Springs.
Evans of course is past worrying about it, but if you wanted to bring out a new vision of America, you would now have to contend with Ford’s lawyers.
I read about this story first on PDNPulse, which had picked it up from The Consumerist, but you can read more about it from the source, the Black Mustang Club forum where you can also see some previews of the calendar. The BMC had sent to to Cafepress to produce and sell. They have a long list of prohibited content on their site, which includes “NO pictures or photographs of products (such as toys). Even if you own a product, trademark laws may still prohibit you from selling merchandise that features pictures of it.” The page also has a convenient link to additional information on intellectual property on Nolo, where you can get the advice that trademark protection applies to the use for competing goods or services that could cause the consumer to be confused.
As BMC’s members are now aware, the whole paraphernalia that has been allowed to grow up around intellectual property is a ridiculous nonsense which has surely been allowed to go considerably too far. Of course we need laws that protect original creative works, and also laws that stop people other than Ford making cars and using Ford logos on them. But here we have a case that clearly involves no conflict of interests and is equally not derogatory in any way to Ford, but rather serves them as valuable free marketing. Far from preventing such use, Ford’s interests would be better served by encouraging and even sponsoring such usage.
The thread has generated 53 pages of comments on the BMC Forum, and they have had to start a new thread to take some of the load – the issue has generated over 8 million hits on the site. I suspect that shortly someone in Ford will come to their senses and give the calendar the go-ahead, because the issue is digging a huge pit of negative responses from American customers. I can’t resist quoting a part of one comment on the site: “many staunch Ford supporters are now saying (paraphrasing), “If this is true and continues, I”m going to dump my (Mustang, F150 SuperCrew, 6.0 PSD, insert model name here) and buying a (Challenger, ’09 Camaro, Ram Quad-Cab, Tundra Crew-Cab, Cummins Turbo-Diesel, DuraMax Silverado HD, insert competing model name here) because they’re being @-holes!”
Walker Evans images above are from the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection. If you would like your own Walker Evans print, go to the Library of Congress site and look at the catalogue of Walker Evans images there – it includes most of this best-known works. Some but not all are available as high quality digital files that you can print – better than Evans did if you have a suitable printer – for yourself. For example there is a 20Mb TIFF version of the Cherokee Parts Store image, although you will find it needs quite a lot of retouching, presumably because of processing faults from the original negative.
Postscript
The day after I made this post, Ford had the sense to settle the problem with the BMC and allow production of the calendar to go ahead. However the statement from someone at Ford, “Ford has no problem with Mustang or other car owners taking pictures of their vehicles for use in club materials like calendars. What we do have an issue with are individuals using Fords logo and other trademarks for products they intend to sell” is perhaps deliberately lacking in clarity as the BMC is of course selling a product which does include the logo.
Trademark law was essentially aimed at preventing other people passing off their goods as those made by the trademark holder. Not to stop people taking photographs or even publishing them.