Donald Trump may have violated another law by selling mugshot merch | US News
Former President Donald Trump is in enough legal trouble already, facing four indictments – and he may have violated yet another law.
Immediately after being booked into jail in the fourth case and becoming the first US president to have a mugshot taken, Trump capitalized on the iconic shot by selling 2024 campaign merchandise featuring it.
But Trump’s mugshot shirts, coffee mugs, koozies, bumper sticker and poster with ‘NEVER SURRENDER!’ that made him $7.1million in three days may violate copyright law, according to some legal experts.
The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, which captured Trump’s scowling mugshot, may rightfully own the image. That in turn could mean those millions of dollars in profit could belong to the sheriff’s office.
Photographer: Emily Manley(Credits: Emily Manley)
‘In the context of photographs taken by law enforcement during the booking process, the author of the mugshot photograph is the law enforcement agency,’ states the 2022 University of Georgia School of Law’s Journal of Intellectual Property Law, as cited by the New York Post.
Individuals can be barred from doing certain things to pictures like mugshots, according to a professor at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Law.
‘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,’ she told Spectrum News 1 Ohio.
‘Making a public display of it, making a public performance of it, which opens up all kinds of fascinating possibilities here.’
The Trump campaign cannot argue that he altered the image enough to create a new thing as it did not alter the picture, said MSNBC’s Dean Obeidallah, who is a lawyer.
Trump’s camp seemed to possibly know the merch could possibly violate the law.
Top Trump aide Chris LaCivita wrote on X (formerly Twitter) the day the mugshot was taken that ‘if you are a campaign, PAC, scammer and you [are] try raising money off the mugshot of @realDonaldTrump and you have not received prior permission …WE ARE COMING AFTER YOU you will NOT SCAM DONORS.’
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Metro.co.uk.
In the end, it could be the sheriff’s office’s decision on whether they want to sue the Trump campaign and any other unofficial merchandise makers that have profited from selling products with the mugshot.
Trump is scheduled to be arraigned on Wednesday in the Georgia election subversion case, which led to his ‘strawberry’ hair mugshot.
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