Here we go again. Like small children who have just discovered the power of the tantrum, the terrible people at A Voice for Men seem to have realized that the only reliable way for them to get the attention of the world is to act like complete assholes in public. And so some fans of AVFM have decided to bring back the “Don’t Be That Girl” campaign — you know, the witless and misogynistic “parody” of the successful Canadian “Don’t Be That Guy” rape awareness campaign. Now they’re postering in Halifax.
But there’s one difference: this time they’ve put the logos of the real sponsors of the real “Don’t Be That Guy” rape awareness project on their phony posters. (You can see the whole list by downloading one of the pdfs of the real posters on this page.)
So far, two of the organizations listed on their phony posters – the Bryony House shelter for victims of domestic violence and the Halifax Police Department – have made very clear that their logos are being used without permission.
https://twitter.com/BryonyHouse/status/448148862193389568
@Allisomething Tk u for reporting. We're not a sponsor of this campaign and find it deeply troubling. We'll be looking into this further HT
— Halifax_Police (@HfxRegPolice) March 24, 2014
It’s a pretty safe bet that the other organizations whose logos were appropriated feel similarly.
I’d like to encourage anyone who can afford it to follow up on a suggestion from Cloudiah in the comments and donate to Bryony House so that some good can come out of all this.
Now, I’m no expert on Canadian law, but it seems rather unlikely to me that it’s legal to simply stick some organization’s logo on something and pretend that they have endorsed it. Especially when that organization is the police.
Apparently some MRAs disagree with me on that:
https://twitter.com/AVoiceForMen/status/448225043026149376
“Your consent is not required” seems to be the operating assumption of a lot of those drawn to the Men’s Rights movement.
In later tweets, Elam claims that using the logos is legal because of “fair use,” which is not actually a term used in Canadian law, and promises that the “[p]osters will continue, cupcake.”
I guess we will see. Here are several more photos of the posters. There’s more discussion of this in the AgainstMensRights subreddit.
Lots of real comedians around town apparently… pic.twitter.com/P92KmW3I41
— Handsome Adam Barrett (@im_adam_barrett) March 24, 2014
and one more before I vomit everywhere pic.twitter.com/jEJTXSSHXG
— Handsome Adam Barrett (@im_adam_barrett) March 24, 2014
EDITED TO ADD: Elam has now responded to the critics, and promises to bankroll any legal challenges against the posterers. It’s pretty clear that he doesn’t understand why the logos are a problem.
EDIT/CORRECTION: It’s not completely clear that this postering campaign originated with AVFM. It’s pretty clear, though, that it’s supported by AVFM, and that those involved in it are supporters of AVFM. I’ve made a few changes to the headline and first graf to reflect this.
Gah. Yeah, these make no logical sense, it’s just a primal scream of “Women are terrible and hurt my feelings!”. The choice of subjects makes it pretty clear that rank misogyny is the only “thinking” they put into these.
Hope they get their asses sued off.
Apart from everything else wrong, they’re not really giving all that provocative of a message. It’s in the “no shit Sherlock” realm. Women shouldn’t beat their children or throw them in the garbage. And your point is? It’s like a poster that says “don’t murder people.” Except of course the seething misogyny. But it’s such a fail because of the no duh-ness. Do they think they’re the only ones against these things? The last one sorta puzzles me since they seem to be always complaining about women not supplying their “demand”. Aren’t we supposed to be offering? Like always?
Federally, Canada doesn’t have safe haven laws, though we have two provinces where a couple of hospitals provide ‘baby hatches’. Baby abandonment here is pretty rare, not really sure why. Here’s an article about it from last May. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/the-revival-of-baby-boxes-for-unwanted-infants-1.1357615
In it, Nova Scotia (the province where these posters are ripped off from), officials claim they haven’t had a child abandonment case in five years. So it’s not exactly a hotbed of dumpster babies.
Actually (and I speak as someone who has done affiliate organizing for charity work and has had to sit with the lawyers on this stuff) you can’t use the logos at all without express prior permission from the individuals involved. You could tell people that resources are available in the area, and hand out a separate sheet that lists a bunch of shelter names and numbers, or the public number of the police, but without explicit permission ahead of time you are not permitted to use an organization’s presence materials (their colors, logos, or fonts) on your marketing items.
Even if they wanted to be in the letter of the law for any organizations covered by current trade agreements (in the US or between the US and Canada), they could only list those organizations without logos and in the colors and font of the rest of the message. Otherwise they are explicitly infringing on trademark. This isn’t “just like” suggesting those organizations are supporting them, they are precisely saying the message is supported by those organizations.
As recently as this past fall I did work on two fund-raisers for The One Fund in Boston, and I had to pass all the promotional materials past their lawyers because we were going to be using their colors and logo. We didn’t have to change anything (the materials were very ‘five w’ focused and unlikely to raise any problems), but we did have to come to an agreement about the nature of the events and the percentage of the ‘take’ which would go to the donation in order to gain their permission, because trademark and presence materials are explicitly not available for ‘fair use’ in the manner Elam and Co. seem to think. (Indeed, putting those logos there seem to clearly represent an “intent to sow confusion” about support and endorsement, which is explicitly prohibited by the law, here in the US, anyway), though AVFRageyDudebros might try to argue that it’s covered because they are engaging in noncommercial criticism of the organizations in question, but they are gonna have to make an argument as to how that is intended and I can’t imagine that argument being anything but stunningly gross and hateful in its expression…
MRA’s do look down pretty universally on sex workers, as they believe that women should be free sex dispensers, for any man that wants it. it’s bad enough when a woman says no. For a woman to have the nerve to charge money for their services… super misandry.
Then again and very unfortunately, most of the world looks down on sex workers for one reason or another, IME.
Thanks for the article, moldybrehd.
I find it odd that the EU objects on the right of a child to know its parentage. I was adopted and didn’t have that right. I only knew stuff because of shenanigans by the staff at the organization that brokered the adoption.
But, yes, clearly not a problem in Nova Scotia.
If anyone wants to see Elam’s blustering without giving them page hits (he tweeted at the Halifax PD, what an internet tough guy!), here’s a FreezePage version of the AVFM post that David linked to in his edit above.
It’s bad when a woman says no to sex. It’s bad when a woman says yes to sex. It’s bad when a woman wants to get married. It’s bad when a woman doesn’t want to get married. It’s bad when a woman wants babies. It’s bad when a woman doesn’t want babies. It’s bad when a woman has sex without charging for it. It’s bad when a woman charges for sex. It’s bad when a woman wants a career. It’s bad when a woman is a goldigger who just wants to sit on the couch and eat bonbons while the man provides.
Does that about cover the AVFM platform? Or should I substitute the word bad for misandry?
From Cloudiah’s link:
Stay classy, Elam!
I can’t speak for Canadian law, but in Britain the extreme right-wing (and openly racist) British National Party made a very expensive mistake when they ran a campaign ad in which they described themselves with the yeast-extract spread Marmite (closely related to Vegemite: I don’t know if there’s a US or Canadian equivalent), on the grounds that it had a famous “love it or hate it” ad campaign that emphasised people’s divisive reactions to it. You know, just like the BNP itself.
The only problem was that a jar of Marmite was prominently displayed onscreen throughout – and, naturally, they hadn’t asked the manufacturer for permission. And the manufacturer was Unilever, the world’s third biggest consumer goods company, which obviously had a very strong interest in protecting its image – and had access to legal funds to facilitate this which, from the BNP’s perspective, were essentially unlimited.
In other words, whoops.
Talking of “whoops”, I mangled my first paragraph – I obviously meant to write “compared themselves”, not “described themselves”. Sorry about that – please don’t sue.
The most hilarious part is that they’ve even left the halifax.ca/menendingviolenceagainstwomen web-link at the bottom of the poster, a link that will take you to the Municipality of Halifax’s website and, in particular, a page promoting the “Don’t be that guy” campaign. I suspect that most people would find that campaign far more reasonable and even-handed than what AVfM is trying to pull.
Whoops, indeed!
Dean Esmay of all people shows up in that comment thread saying that using the logos was a pretty bad idea, but he got smacked down really quick with lots of fair use/fair handling handwaving. Because parody or some such nonsense.
Fair use provisions in copyright law include the right to parody. If an entity wants to peddle lies, then they best be prepared to have their lies parodied… and that means the right for those parodying to lift logos and proprietary symbols and reframe them in a context that highlights their absurdity.. Paul Elam & Co are perfectly 100% in the clear and there is nothing that anyone can do about it. Free speech and all that. Eat your hearts out. It’s going to be fun seeing Halifax Police and Byrony House true to sue for this. Please, do go for it. lol
I spotted this here before looking at AVFM, and am pleased to see that Paul gets it… he’s way ahead of you.
Yeah, this. Because you’re not just using someone else’s words or ideas and not attributing it to them (i.e. copyright infringement), you are using their public and professional identity and attributing it to something they never said or condoned. I work in communications in a large international organization, and the level of faffery that goes on with logos (joint publications, kill me now) is borderline ridiculous FOR EXACTLY THIS REASON.
U.S. law against false endorsement. http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Section_43(a)_of_the_Lanham_Act
I wonder if leaving that link there was intentional, to make it look like it’s really sponsored by the same organization that did the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign. Then again, this is an MRA group, who probably didn’t think much past “put nasty picture and woman hating slogan on a piece of paper.” The notion that they were really trying to pass this as being legitimate may be too much of a stretch.
And, yes, we need to change bad to misandry. EVERYTHING bad that happens in a man’s life is misandry and it’s always a woman’s fault. He stubs his toe on the coffee table while alone in his house, without a woman in sight and it’s MISANDRY. And the fault of the woman he stood by in the bus shelter who didn’t immediately hike up her skirt and offer him sex on right there on the street. If she had, he wouldn’t be thinking about his boner as much and would have paid more attention to where he was walking.
Honestly, I’d be surprised if any of them even visited the website.
“Just because it’s your kid
doesn’t mean it’s your punching bag.”
“Just because it’s your baby
doesn’t mean it’s your trash.”
…What? Who came up with those? The first lines don’t lead in any logical way to the second ones. I guess it kind of goes without saying, but these posters are terrible. The whole thing is basically just, “Women do bad stuff too, sometimes! Lets call attention to that!” and it’s so painfully obvious about it. These MRAs don’t care about children, and the fact that they’re using the subject of child abuse as some kind of convenient platform makes me sick to my stomach.
I’m sure someone has said this before, but it’s really odd that they read the “don’t be that guy” posters as saying “all men are rapists.” It seems like the whole point of the slogan “don’t be that guy” is to get the male viewer to not identify with the rapist. It’s not “MEN: don’t rape people,” it’s dispelling myths about something it assumes that you don’t want to do in the first place.
I live in the area. This is across the harbour from where Rehtaeh Parsons went to school.
I’ve read all the comments and the reply tweets and stuff and I need some brain bleach, but I can’t honestly tell whether they are so blinded by their own smug self-righteousness that they can’t actually hear what their critics are saying here or if they are just denser than osmium. They don’t seem to get that, as loathsome as the posters are, no one is claiming they don’t have the ‘right’ to spew their hatred, but they don’t get to lie and pretend that the organizations listed on the posters support them. Elam seems too dense to get that no one is asking for consent on the posters themselves (and LOL, all the folks who are now claiming they are going to drive up there to put up posters in the hopes of getting arrested) but on the use of the logos.
What a bunch of maroons!
Obviously a Canadian lawyer will know far more about the relevant statutes, but a quick Google suggests that Section 52 of the Competition Act may apply here:
Surely claiming the endorsement of organizations with reputations to protect would qualify as “false or misleading in a material respect”?
Agreed Barrakudah. The solution to child abandonment would be things like increasing the social safety net so all mothers can afford to care for their babies. That’s misandry because they would have to tax the hardworking menz to pay for it! Another solution would be to make sure all women and teen girls have access to birth control and abortion services so there aren’t as many unwanted births. That’s enabling slutty behavior though, so that’s misandry. Plus, women can’t have abortions without the father’s permission because that’s misandry, but we can’t make him pay child support because that’s misandry too!
Nope. They don’t care about abandoned babies at all.
It’s of the form “You don’t want to do X, Y is a kind of X, so you don’t want do Y.” But, they’ve interpreted it as simply “Don’t do X.” Which is why their parodies don’t make any sense.