The Meshugana Mug Shot Megillah Pt.2: Trump’s grift off mug shot may violate U.S. copyright laws

 

Above and below are renditions of the Trump mug shot which I created using BeFunky.

Click above to enlarge

Read on single page here.

Here's a continuation of my previous Trump mug shot story. For a story about a picture of a head it sure has legs. 

I address what Dean Obeidallah wrote in the opinion piece below about the chance that the Fulton County Sheriff's Dept. could sue Trump for copyright infringement because of his making money off the use of his mug shot.

Click above to read article which is
 is by Dean Obeidallah who is a lawyer, radio host,
and comedian.

Read my first blog about the mug shot here.

Note: I am not a lawyer, I'm a retired psychotherapist, so any legal opinions here are based on my impression of the law. 

There are three short videos in this blog which I suggest you play.

Trump is notorious for playing music from artists who haven't given him permission to do so. In fact in 2020 22 musicians expressed their desire to have him stop using their musics at events.

Now he is making money off of a law enforcement agency booking photo, aka a mug shot, taken by a sheriff's department. For someone who claims he never heard the term "mug shot" because they never taught about it at Wharton he seems to have learned quickly the economics related to having had one taken of him.

Trump does have a feral instinctual intelligence for figuring out the best way to appeal to his cult. Showman that he is he made the best of the moment as the photographer snapped the shutter when he was being booked. You can't ask for a second chance the way you can when you get your drivers license photo taken. He gave good glower. You can almost hear him growling. Or maybe it's supposed to be a snarl. 

It's  not the MGM lion's roar.

Click above to play

I am sure if he could he would have had a video version of a mug shot where he could roar like the MGM lion or the Tarzan King of the Jungle he fancies himself to be. 

Click above to play

I assume he wants you to hear him vocalizing something as menacing a a wolf warning you of imminent attack:

Click above to play

I rather doubt Dean Obeidallah's pointing out that the Fulton County Sheriff's Department has a reasonable case for initiating a civil suit for monetary compensation for Trump's use of thier mug shot will amount to anything. 

The question of the legality of using the mug shot to make money was address on August 25th in a Spectrum News 1 article by Taylor Bruck here. Like me, she's not a lawyer, but she has done considerable research on this subject. (About her)

Here's an excerpt citing what Betsy Rosenblatt, a professor at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Law, said:

“You're prohibited from using it for a number of things without authorization,” Rosenblatt said. “You’re prohibited from reproducing it, making a derivative work of it, distributing it without authorization, or that is to say distributing anything that isn't the one copy you already lawfully have, and various other things. Making a public display of it, making a public performance of it, which opens up all kinds of fascinating possibilities here.” 

So will the potentially thousands of people who are already using the mugshot to make a profit get in trouble? 

Rosenblatt said in order to pursue a claim for copyright infringement, the owner of the copyright, who she said is likely the Fulton County Sheriff's Department, would have to be the one to sue. 

“Whether the Fulton County Sheriff's Department would decide to enforce its copyright is entirely up to them,” Rosenblatt said. “But it's also reasonable to think that the Fulton County Sheriff's Office might think, you know, this is a public document, it belongs to the world in a way, [the] copyright belongs to us. But the news about it belongs to the world. And we're not going to undertake the expense and trouble of hiring copyright counsel and sending out takedowns and cease and desist and letters, or in lawsuits.”

Can you legally use Trump’s mugshot on merchandise? Can you legally use Trump’s mugshot on merchandise? 2

Can you legally use Trump’s mugshot on merchandisWWWhile winning presumably would provide the county with much needed funds for jail renovation taking the case to court would require money, obviously with no guarantee they'd prevail in court. 

It would also take a long time to resolve. The best they could hope for might be a cease and desist order to force Trump to stop the mug shot grift. It might even be possible for a judge to order all American companies involved in selling mug shot merch to stop doing so. 

There would be a drawback to a judge ordering a cease and desist in that the more Trump makes from sales of mug shot merch the more money there would be if the sheriff's department ultimately wins.

While I'm not a lawyer my impression is that all things considered in Georgia the powers that be won't bother with a civil suit about Trump grifting off of the mug shot. 

Update: Jonathan Capehart interviewed his Aunt Gloria this morning about how Trump is supposedly gaining street creds with Black voters here.

Of course Jessie Watters above, is an expert on what Black convicted of felonies think about white colar criminals.

Addendum: Here's another mug shot version I made simply by darkening the original:

The Meshugana Mug Shot Megillah

 

Translation from Yiddish:
The Meshugana Mug Shot Megillah

My original title:

Megalomanic Makes the Most of his Mug Shot and how Murdoch's NY Post nails Trump for lying about weight and height at indictment in top website story.

In her wanting to treat Donald Trump just like another other arrestee at the Fulton County Jail Fani Willis managed to help him snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by requiring that his mug shot be taken. She also gave him a parade led by what at my attempt to count them was about 20 blue lights flashing motorcycle officers. 

I haven't seen that many big bikes since I drove to Oregon from Massachusetts and stopped to stay overnight by chance in Elko, Nevada during their annual motorcycle jamboree (below)

A lot is being made in the media about Trump lieing about his height and weight. This was the top of the website story in Murdoch's New York Post:

Click above to read article

By Hal Brown

Heres another Fox News story:

Click to read

The Trump mug shot has dominated the news to such an extent that it already has a detailed Wikipedia entry (here in three parts, click each to enlarge):

It's noteworthy that Wikipedia has pages devoted to discussion as to whether this subject even deserves suhc a distinction saying that the case for this is the the photo will surely becone iconic. 

Articles for deletion/Mug shot of Donald Trump

and

Talk:Mug shot of Donald Trump

I thought we'd finally find out whether or not Trump met the medical definition of being morbidly obese after he was arrested at the Fulton County Jail. I know it is usual for those who are arrested to have their height and weight recorded. 

Morpid obesity is now called class III obesity and is defined as follows:

Class III obesity, formerly known as morbid obesity, is a complex chronic disease in which a person has a body mass index (BMI) of 40 or higher or a BMI of 35 or higher and is experiencing obesity-related health conditions. The BMI scale is not always accurate, so healthcare providers may use other tests and tools to assess obesity, such as measuring waist circumference.

Class III obesity can contribute to the development of several serious health conditions, such as Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The good news is that class III obesity is manageable and treatable. Reference

It was not to be. The authorities allowed him to report his own height and weight.

Former President Donald Trump lost 25 pounds — and gained an inch of height — since April, according to jail records filed Thursday after he surrendered to Fulton County authorities on charges related to his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

The 77-year-old’s measurements, which were pre-reported, according to ABC News, indicate that Trump is 215 pounds with a height of 6’3″ —25 pounds lighter and 1 inch taller than when he was booked in Manhattan in April. NY Post article

I found the fact that The New York Post, at least at 5:00 EST, had this as their top story on their website. The article includes several incredulus and sarcastic tweets and comments about this lie and concludes:

“So, he’s lost 25 pounds since he was president is what we are understanding,” CNN host Jake Tapper said, “because he was, I believe, Dr. Ronny Jackson said he weighed something like 242 for his official physical, which people at the time were skeptical of that number.”

Trump’s final physical exam as president, conducted in June of 2020, measured him to be 244 pounds and  6’3’’ tall. Based on body mass index, those measurements would put him in the clinically obese category.

The late night edition of the paper features a full page image of his mug shot. Notable there is the line under the photo with the word "glowers" used to decribe how he looked: "Trump glowers in the first mug shot ever taken of a former president after he was arrested on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 George election."

Click above to enlarge

Did he glower or "strike a glowering pose" that he'd rehearsed in font of a mirror? What's your guess? He knew that the photo would be a big money raiser for him and be use on a wide variety of merch. Do you think he'd just not make sure he was camera ready?

The only glitch in the plan was he didn't prepare for the glaring lighting, possibly a flash, that made his face appear washed out and almost cartoonish.

This is how The Washngton Post decribed the photo in the article 

"Trump’s mug shot is perfectly on brand The former president’s booking photo serves as an official portrait" by their chief film critic:

Once the image was released shortly after Trump’s exit from the jail, it seemed to be mostly of a piece with those of Trump’s rogues’ gallery of co-defendants: banal, badly lit, with the harsh flatness of a drugstore passport snapshot. Dressed in a blue suit with his usual red tie and posed against a gray backdrop, a sullen Trump went with the scowl, glaring up at the camera with beetle-browed fury in a weird mash-up of the 0.5 selfie aesthetic and “Wanted: Dead or Alive” classicism. In the upper left corner, the Fulton County sheriff’s watermark provided the only authorial signature on an otherwise featureless piece of dispiriting iconography.

Trump lied saying he never heard the word mug shot (now universally understood to refer to a booking photo) when speaking before he left Atlanta. He said never heard the words at the Wharton School of Finance. It's impossible anyone who watches as much TV as he does never to have heard  mug shot. As usual he touted going to the presigious Wharton School of Finance at the Ivy Leage University of Pennsylvania. In fact this is a prestigious graduate school and Trump only was an undergradutate transfer student from Fordham there getting a bachelors degree in economics. This is a far cry from getting a graduate MBA degree at one of the top business school in the country. 

For more about this exaggeration read this article:

The Murdoch owned Fox News website had the story about his height and weight this morning but in a less prominent position. Fox News highlighted the mug shot story on the top of their website calling it the "mug shot drama".

Click about to read article about Trump's weight

Less sensational media aren't featuring stories as prominently ahout Trump's mug shot and how he is trying to sell merch with.

The New York City tabloid competing on the newstands and in the kiosks in the anti-Trump Daily News. This is their overnight front page. It also features the mug shot but makes a strong editorial comment.

The New York Tmes had a story about the mug shot but far down their main page:

Click to read (subscription)

Excerpt: As soon as it was taken, it became the de facto picture of the year. A historic image that will be seared into the public record and referred to for perpetuity — the first mug shot of an American president, taken by the Fulton County, Ga., Sheriff’s Office after Donald J. Trump’s fourth indictment. Though because it is also the only mug shot, it may be representative of all of the charges.

As such, it is also a symbol of either equality under the law or the abuse of it — the ultimate memento of a norm-shattering presidency and this social-media-obsessed, factionalized age.

“It’s dramatically unprecedented,” said Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton University. “Of all the millions, maybe billions of photos taken of Donald Trump, this could stand as the most famous. Or notorious.” It is possible, he added, that in the future the mug shot will seem the ultimate bookend to a political arc in the United States that began decades ago, with Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook.

The only glower that came near to Trump's for gloweryness was Rudy's:

Jenna Ellis looked like she was posing for the high school yearbook photo she missed since she and her two brothers were homeschooled by their parents (Reference):

More of the photos and various ways each person tried to pose:

Read the HUFFPOST article about each of the people pictured above.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who will have the most famous mug shot of them all?

Click to enlarge

Addendum:

Whether Trump's Twitter (X) return was a triumph or a twizzler tease reamins to be seen. No doubt he'll have a bigger audience than he had on Truth Social. It will open him to having less than lauditory replies posted in atrticles like this one from HUFFPOST:

Trump's First Tweet In Years Is Being Mocked For 1 Truly Awkward Mistake

The former president returned to the platform for the first time since he was banned in January 2021.

I never joined Truth Social (it requires an email and phone number) so now I can post my own replies to what Trump puts on social media - maybe some will be republished.

Now we are learning that

Trump shakes up potential Truth Social merger with return to ex-Twitter...

I like that term ex-Twitter, aka known as X Twitter. Stay turned...