Yesterday afternoon, online bumper sticker printer CafePress announced that it would now be able to offer bumper stickers incorporating the logo of the U.S. Marine Corps:
We’ve sat down and inked-out a win-win agreement with the U.S. Marine Corps and can now host officially licensed USMC merchandise (be sure to tag your designs with USMCFP). Also, please be sure to follow the new Marine Corps design guidelines – violating products will be shot down – Ooh-Rah!
Those guidelines read as follows:
- No use of an artist's signature or URL (i.e., website address)
- No advertising of any businesses, products, or services of a third party
- No profanity, vulgar language, graphically violent images, or hate language
- No skull imagery
- No blood imagery
- No sexual innuendo, explicit sexual language, images, or graphics
- No reference to drugs, medication, or alcohol
- No derogatory reference to race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, mental handicap, obesity or physical impairment
- No political party associations (e.g. Republican, Democratic)
- No Undergarments (you cannot create Marine Corps thongs, boxer shorts, boxer briefs, etc)
All Marine Corps names, emblems, and logos are trademarks of the USMC.
It is interesting to note the trademarking of a logo of a branch of the United States government. As a test of political speech (where “political” refers to issues of policy and not partisan electioneering), we’ve designed the following bumper sticker that meets all the above conditions:
If you click on the bumper sticker’s image here and find that the sticker is available for sale, you’ll know that the Marine Corps can handle a little critique. But if the sticker is no longer for sale, you’ll know that there’s an additional rule in play: no bumper stickers that air criticism of the Marine Corps. That would be government suppression of political speech.
Stay tuned to see what happens.
Update: As of July 17, the bumper sticker has not been removed from the Cafepress marketplace. Meanwhile, shirts like the one below that violate the design guidelines in multiple ways are also being allowed:
It will be interesting to see how winnowing proceeds.
Losing out on a LOT of business due to these guidelines. Both cafepress and shopkeepers
Now that bumper sticker has, yes, been removed.
Bumper Stickers about the Marine Corps, a government body, are only permissible if they say nice things about the Marine Corps.
Only permissible on CafePress, you mean, right?
Right… but the Marine Corps is the one that controls the logo use. They set the terms for use in their agreement with CafePress.