It was intended to be the humiliation of former President Trump, but instead, the Trump campaign took the lemons and made lemonade.
Leftists were frothing at the mouth that former President Trump would finally get a mugshot. Hoping the image would finally humiliate him and drive down his support.
But instead, the opposite happened and now leftists are demanding legal consequences.
Lefitst type legal scholars are raising the question of whether the Trump campaign violated United States copyright law by selling merchandise featuring ex-President Donald Trump’s mugshot.
The image of Trump scowling into the camera was taken at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta and the Trump campaign wasted no time making a profit off it by hawking merchandise with the slogan “Never surrender”, ranging from t-shirts to mugs – within three days of release, the campaign made $7.1 million on the goods.
Legal experts are claiming that the money may belong rightfully to the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office that took the photo, since US copyright law stipulates that such entities own the rights to mugshots they take.
“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 2022 University of Georgia School of Law’s Journal of Intellectual Property Law states.
Betsy Rosenblatt, a professor at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Law, noted that using the photo for commercial use is prohibited without prior authorization. The Trump campaign did not make any alterations to the mugshot, nor may it claim fair use, leaving the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office with a case for legal action.
“You’re prohibited from using it for a number of things without authorization,” she told Spectrum News 1 Ohio.
“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. Making a public display of it, making a public performance of it, which opens up all kinds of fascinating possibilities here.”
They are so mad that the mugshot backfired on them it’s almost hilarious.
