Primary Campaigns & Intellectual Property Rights Clash
Just this week a couple of incidents reminded me about how attitudes about intellectual property rights are changing. As the age demographics in this country change, more and more people are gaining adulthood without much respect for the rights people have to things like recorded music, logos and identifying items used by organizations. That has led to a couple of instances of misuse of those things by staffers or others connected to the Bernie Sanders campaign.
First, campaign literature was circulated by the Sanders campaign with the AARP logo included on the literature. Since the AARP does not endorse candidates, that could possibly be misinterpreted by people reading the literature. In a second incident, buttons identifying the wearer as a member of the Las Vegas local of the Culinary Workers union were donned by Sanders staffers or supporters, who gained entrance to restricted employee dining areas at four casinos. They then campaigned for Sanders.
In both cases, the organizations involved objected to the use of their identifying intellectual property for political purposes without permission. In both cases, it's entirely possible that staffers or supporters who are in a younger demographic group simply didn't recognize or understand the rights those organizations have to control the use of logos or identifying badges. It's endemic in youthful Americans to consider such intellectual property rights as outmoded and antiquated.
That lack of respect for such materials has led to ripping music tracks and downloading movies from file sharing sites, rather than paying for the material. It has become a serious problem for the industries and individuals that create and produce such intellectual property. Things are changing, and fewer and fewer people seem to understand the rights held by the individuals and organizations to that property.
I expect to see more and more such breaches of ethics and laws protecting intellectual property during this election year. Already, several Republican candidate have usurped musical tracks and videos and have had to be reminded that they need permission to use such intellectual property in their campaigns.
I suspect that the candidates, themselves, understand the issue with this and would not approve of such tactics. But candidates generally assign responsibility for campaign collateral to staffs and sometimes even unpaid volunteers. In many cases, the people such work has been delegated to simply do not understand that permission must be obtained from the copyright holders of such property. They're simply not aware of how seriously organizations and people take such rights. In other cases, they may simply not care about such rights attached to those materials.
The problem here is that others do know what their rights are and rightly object to misuse of intellectual property by campaigns they may not even support. It is a growing problem, and one that campaigns need to get a much tighter grip on. Inadvertent damage to a campaign is still damage. Youthful lack of concern or ignorance of intellectual property rights can lead to serious problems for any campaign, particularly when races have very slim margins.
I suspect that some campaign staffs are about to get further instruction on such matter today. There have been embarrassments.
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