Alison and Claire Egan gazed up at Barack Obama’s rugged, wind-swept image in Manhattan’s Times Square on Friday, snapping pictures of the giant billboard atop the Red Lobster restaurant.
The president looked pretty good in his casual cold-weather jacket, pronounced the tourists from Australia. But what, they wondered, was the leader of the free world doing modeling for an apparel ad?
“I don’t think it helps his credibility as a politician,” Claire said.
Of course, Obama wasn’t moonlighting as a model. The Weatherproof outerwear company had purchased an Associated Press photo of the president at the Great Wall of China, in which, to their great fortune, he was wearing their jacket. Without his permission, they built an ad campaign around it.
On Friday, after being contacted by the White House, the company pledged to take down the billboard — in about two weeks.
“We need time to create a new ad campaign,” Weatherproof president Freddie Stollmack said. “We can’t have an empty billboard.”
In the meantime, he said, the ad campaign had been “absolutely” the right thing to do.
Legal experts say the incident shows that even though Americans have the right to protect their image from unauthorized use, for the president, it’s trickier than most to pursue that right.
“The president probably has the narrowest ability of any of us to protect his image, because he’s the most public person,” trademark lawyer and intellectual property expert Anthony Biller said. “And even if legally he has a right to stop the purely commercial use of his image, does he create more harm by going after these people?”
There’s also federal legislation protecting the public against being misled by implied endorsement. The White House said earlier this week it was asking Weatherproof to remove the billboard because it implied Obama’s endorsement of the product.
The photo was taken by Charles Dharapak of The Associated Press and Weatherproof purchased the right to use it from AP Images.
The Egans from Australia weren’t bothered by the ad.
“We were just wondering how he’d look in Bonds,” they laughed, referring to a popular brand of Australian underwear.
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