Thin Skinned Whiny People

Color me less than surprised:

MoveOn.org's excessively discounted broadside against General David Petraeus in the New York Times two weeks ago won't rank as its most successful tactic. The full-page nastygram appears not only to have solidified Republican opposition in the Senate for proposals to curtail the Iraq war effort, but also to have shaken the group's rich Hollywood funding base.

So it's not too surprising that the liberal advocacy group would be a mite touchy from all the blowback online, even though it should be used to the abuse by now. So touchy, in fact, that it's been sending out cease-and-desist letters to CafePress, a website that lets people offer custom-designed t-shirts, coffee mugs and the like for sale. Last week it demanded that the site remove eight items, arguing that they violated MoveOn's merchandising trademarks.

Trademark law doesn't confer monopoly rights over all uses of a registered phrase or symbol, however, and it wasn't created simply to protect the trademark owner's interests. Instead, it's designed to protect consumers against being misled or confused about brands. The courts have repeatedly ruled in favor of parodies and critiques; that's why www.famousbrandnamesucks.com doesn't violate famousbrandname's trademark. And most, if not all, of the items targeted by MoveOn were clearly designed to razz it, not to trick buyers into thinking they were the group's products.

Beyond that, it's amazing that MoveOn would try to squelch political speech.

H/T Instapundit, and as Glenn notes:

They told me that if George W. Bush were reelected simple Internet parodies would be ruthlessly suppressed by a political commissariat. And they were right!

As we have noted here before, liberals can be best described by this Churchill quote:

"Everyone is in favor of free speech ... but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage."