Heh, this is funny. It is now being alleged that one of the Sharron Angle campaign’s efforts to attack Harry Reid for being soft on illegal immigration was itself… illegal!
As the Huffington Post reports, the Hasbro corporation, which owns the “Monopoly” game, has sent Team Angle a cease-and-desist letter over their website “Harry Reid’s Amnesty Game,” which uses Monopoly imagery and touts itself as being “fun for the whole illegal family”:
“The MONOPOLY image that you are referring to was used without permission — and our legal department sent a cease and desist letter via fax to Ms. Angle’s offices on Friday,” said Hasbro spokesman Pat Riso in a statement to The Huffington Post on Monday.As of the publishing of this piece, however, the site remained up, and Riso said that they have not yet heard anything from the Angle campaign. An Angle spokesman did not respond to a request for comment from The Huffington Post.
Ironically, this follows Angle herself having taken a very hard line on intellectual property and fair-use issues.
Back in July, Angle’s campaign sent Team Reid a cease-and-desist letter for reposting her old, pre-primary campaign website, in which she took much stronger right-wing positions such as phasing out Social Security, to compare it to her post-primary site. Despite a threat of a lawsuit, the Reid campaign only briefly took down the site, made some slight modifications (such as removing some sign-up fields) and put it right back up again.
Angle then continued to threaten legal action, but nothing came of it. “Well your website is like you, it’s your intellectual property. So they can’t use something that’s yours, intellectual property, unless they pay you for it or get your permission,” she said at the time. It was an interesting sight: A candidate for office was trying to suppress the reproduction of her own past campaign literature, claiming that an opponent cannot use it without her permission in order to criticize her.
The TPM Poll Average gives Angle a lead of 49.5%-46.4%.
Eric Kleefeld
Eric Kleefeld joined TPM as an intern for the final months of the 2006 midterm elections, and then kept showing up for work. His other interests include guitars, old comic books and the politics of various English-speaking countries.
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