McLeod, Kembrew. Letter to Leo Stoller. July 22, 2005.

Summmary: After reading a New York Times story (“He says he owns the word 'stealth' (actually, he claims `chutzpah', too”, July 4, 2005) about a gentleman who makes a living by registering common words as trademarks, sending threatening letters to companies that use those words in their advertising, and settling out of court for small ransoms, anti-IP prankster Kembrew McLeod looked at a list of other words and phrases that the gentleman claims to own the rights to, and discovered that one of those phrases is `freedom of expression'.

It so happens that McLeod owns the trademark to the phrase `freedom of expression', as a result of a publicity stunt he engineered some years ago: He trademarked the phrase, persuaded a friend to violate the trademark, and hired a gullible lawyer to write the friend a cease-and-desist letters (“Your company has been using the mark Freedom of Expression. ... Such use creates a likelihood of confusion in the market and also creates substantial risk of harm to the reputation and goodwill of our client. This letter, therefore, constitutes formal notice of your infringement of our clients trademark rights and a demand that you refrain from all further use of Freedom of Expression.” He then sent out a press release, continuing to pose as an outraged victim of trademark infringement, and got written up in the papers as saying (deadpan) “I didn't go to the trouble, the expense, and the time of trademarking freedom of expression.” (There's more to the story, which McLeod tells here and in chapter 3 of his book, Freedom of expression: overzealous copyright bozos and other enemies of creativity.)

So now McLeod has sent a similar cease-and-desist letter to the trademark specialist, in the name of the Freedom of Expression Security Consortium (“Regulating Freedom in the Marketplace of Ideas”), demanding that he immediately stop his unauthorized use of `freedom of expression'.