For our latest Hall of Shame entry, we turn our gaze towards the City of Abbotsford in Canada. For reference, here’s their logo. Commit it to memory, as you’ll want to remember what it looks like for later:
City officials took issue with a 2013 post written by a homeless blogger that criticized them for reportedly “deliberately spread[ing] chicken manure on a homeless person’s camp” in an effort to deter people from congregating in the area. To demonstrate just how… dirty a move the blogger thought this was, he illustrated his post with a doctored image of the city’s logo, which had been modified to include a large … well, see for yourself:
The accompanying text reads:
“Oh crap! Abbotsford already needs to update their new city logo.”
That seems to make the blogger’s feelings quite clear. Unhappy, however, with this depiction of their logo, a marketing firm purporting to act on behalf of the Abbotsford city council sent us a DMCA takedown notification earlier this January, claiming copyright over the image.
It is unclear why the city council decided to go down this particular route in an attempt to have the image removed, or why it took them almost four years to do so. What is clear, however, is that this stinks. Pardon the pun. It was glaringly obvious that the addition of the hilariously large feces was for the purposes of parody, and tied directly to the criticisms laid out in the post. As a result, it seems hard to believe that the city council took fair use considerations into account before firing off their ill-advised notice, and trying to wipe up this mess.
We rejected the complaint, and passed it on to the blogger for his perusal. In response, he updated the logo, just in case there was any doubt that the image was being used for the purposes of commentary or criticism:
Much clearer now.
City of Abbotsford, welcome to the Hall of Shame.
Note: Our use of the Abbotsford city logo in this post is also for the purposes of commentary or criticism, and therefore falls under fair use protections. If anybody on the council happens to be reading, please don’t send us another DMCA takedown. 🙂
Transparency Report 