We’re all familiar with the recent brouhaha about NSA telephone\/internet monitoring.\u00a0 We also all know about any number of instances where our “illustrious” Federal government seems to ignore the public and do what it pleases, consequences be damned.\u00a0 (No, I didn’t say a damn thing about the AHCA.\u00a0 But if the shoe fits . . . . )<\/p>\n
Well, it seems like one enterprising artist in Minnesota decided to use those things to his advantage commercially – and IMO, hilariously.\u00a0 Here’s the design on one of his t-shirts<\/a>.\u00a0 The image is rather smallish, but expands nicely.<\/p>\n Predictably, some of our American Royalty apparently “were not amused”. NSA reportedly sent the guy a “cease and desist” letter<\/a> claiming “violation of intellectual property” in parodying the NSA seal.<\/p>\n Sheesh.\u00a0 It’s called parody<\/em>, guys.\u00a0 Seems to me what little I remember of the law says that parody generally is considered “fair use” of intellectual property.\u00a0 And that’s clearly a parody of the actual NSA seal<\/a> – check out the text used in lieu of the original text along the bottom border of the joke seal. (smile)<\/p>\n Besides – last time I checked, documents\/images\/photographs produced by the Federal government cannot<\/span> be copyrighted.\u00a0 They can be protected against illicit use by Federal law, but this doesn’t seem to be such a case.\u00a0 This is an altered version that is obviously a parody of the original vice deceptive use.<\/p>\n To his credit, the guy didn’t back down. He’s partnered with Public Citizen and plans on taking NSA to court for violating his First Amendment right to free speech.<\/p>\n I’m guessing this one ends up settled out-of-court pretty soon.<\/p>\n Given how well the rest of our “esteemed” Federal government listens these days, I’m seriously considering ordering one of those shirts.\u00a0 If you’re interested in doing so, a link where you can do that is is in the linked article (2nd link).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
![actual NSA seal<\/a> – check out the text used in lieu of the original text along the bottom border of the joke seal. (smile)<\/p>\nBesides – last time I checked, documents\/images\/photographs produced by the Federal government cannot<\/span> be copyrighted.\u00a0 They can be protected against illicit use by Federal law, but this doesn’t seem to be such a case.\u00a0 This is an altered version that is obviously a parody of the original vice deceptive use.<\/p>\nTo his credit, the guy didn’t back down. He’s partnered with Public Citizen and plans on taking NSA to court for violating his First Amendment right to free speech.<\/p>\nI’m guessing this one ends up settled out-of-court pretty soon.<\/p>\nGiven how well the rest of our “esteemed” Federal government listens these days, I’m seriously considering ordering one of those shirts.\u00a0 If you’re interested in doing so, a link where you can do that is is in the linked article (2nd link).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We’re all familiar with the recent brouhaha about NSA telephone\/internet monitoring.\u00a0 We also all know about … T-Shirt of the Month<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":623,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[213,15,26,170],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-your-tax-dollars-at-work","category-legal","category-blather","category-who-knows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38282\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"http:\/\/www.thegunmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/NSA-Seal.jpg\"){kind=link}