George Orwell’s Estate Goes Orwellian, Sends Takedown Notice Over a Number

27.10.2015 Nate Hoffelder 5 Comments

Here’s a tale which is both sad and ironic.

TorrentFreak reports that the estate of the author George Orwell has taken his most famous work as a how to manual, and not a cautionary tale:

Ironically, the estate itself has gained a reputation for exerting tight control of copyrights and trademarks, surveilling the Internet for possible offenses.

This is something Internet radio host Josh Hadley has now experienced first hand. Hadley runs 1201 Beyond where he gathers and distributes his shows and writings, among other things.

Before he had his own site and store Hadley used CafePress to sell T-shirts. Although he never sold any, the old store didn’t go unnoticed by the Orwell estate.

Last week he received a worrying email from CafePress informing him that one of his designs had been taken offline due to an alleged copyright violation.

If the designs that Hadley shared with TorrentFreak are the ones that were pulled from CafePress, the copyright complaint is bogus. The designs look like original work to me, and the only detail that the designs share with the book is the number, 1984.

As everyone knows, you can’t copyright a number, even if it is the title of a book. But that is exactly what the estate’s literary executor is claiming, according to TorrentFreak. "The estate has never licensed merchandising, nor have the licensees of the relevant film rights, under which merchandising usually comes. Some of the merchandising I asked to be taken down was in clear breach of copyright," its literary executor Bill Hamilton told TorrentFreak.

Now, if Hamilton wanted to claim trademark infringement, that would be a different case. It is possible to trademark a number, although I don’t think you could trademark a year (it’s too generic and widely used).

But even that does not matter in this case. I checked the US Patent and Trademark office and the Orwell estate doesn’t have a registered trademark on the number 1984. I found around 60 trademarks that incorporate 1984, and none appear to refer to the book or belong to the estate.

In short, this case is copyright trolling, pure and simple.

image by jason ilagan