After impeachments, indictments, fake news, bogus legal theories and assorted lawsuits have all failed, the left now has a new way to “weaponize” the government against former President Donald Trump.
Copyright law.
After his arrest in Atlanta last month, Trump flipped the script on liberals and used the now-iconic mugshot from the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta to raise millions for his campaign and boost his popularity among Republican voters, and even song somne young black and Hispanic citizens.
Yet, according to the New York Post, so-called legal “experts” now claim Trump’s campaign may have violated U.S. copyright law by selling his merch with the photo of Trump famously scowling at the camera, along with the phrase “Never Surrender.”
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The Western Journal reported recently that Trump’s campaign hauled in $9.4 million almost immediately after the photo was made public. Some of that funding included $864,000 from sales of 24,000 coffee mugs, almost $2 million from distributing 36,000 T-shirts, and another $352,000 from sales of 8,600 posters.
“But legal scholars say that money may rightfully belong to the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, which took the photo, as US copyright law stipulates that the law enforcement agency that takes a mugshot is the legal owner of it,” the Post reported on Tuesday.
“In the context of photographs taken by law enforcement during the booking process, the author of the mugshot photograph is the law enforcement agency,” the University of Georgia School of Law’s Journal of Intellectual Property Law noted last year, according to the Post.
Betsy Rosenblatt, a professor at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Law, said, “You’re prohibited from using it for a number of things without authorization.”
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“You’re prohibited from reproducing it, making a derivative work of it, distributing it without authorization, or that is to say distributing anything that isn’t the one copy you already lawfully have, and various other things,” she added. “Making a public display of it, making a public performance of it, which opens up all kinds of fascinating possibilities here.”
The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office declined to comment on what actions it might take, the Post noted.
But the paper also pointed out that fiscal problems may lead Sheriff Patrick Labat to consider the move.
Labat, the Post reported, has recently been begging the county for additional funding to fix issues at the county jail.
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