The name Julian Assange has become synonymous with a number of freedoms. Freedom of information, freedom of expression, freedom of the press - Assange and many of his supporters champion the right of human beings to communicate with each other without governmental intervention.
In his public statements, Assange appears to reject outright the legitimacy of restrictions by governments on their people’s freedoms to speak and to access information. In March 2008, he called on his volunteers to defend absolute freedom: “it is time to sum the great freedoms of every nation and not subtract them. It is time for the world as an international collective of communicating peoples to arise and say ‘here I am’”.
Arising and saying “here I am” is something Assange is good at. We saw this most recently in his surprise video-stoush with Julia Gillard on last night’s Q&A. The televised appearance formed part of the ongoing struggle by the “Cypherpunk Revolutionary” to liberate individual freedoms from the stranglehold of the state.
Assange’s latest play in the WikiLeaks saga may therefore have left both admirers and detractors scratching their heads. Assange has applied to the UK Intellectual Property Office to register “Julian Assange” as a trade mark.
The move is strange not because it may help Assange to capitalise on his fame. There is no rule saying cypherpunks have any less right than rockstars or politicians to profit from their celebrity. What makes Assange’s application notable is that he is seeking to benefit from a system built on a nuanced view of individual freedom.
The trade mark system is, by its nature, a balancing act between competing public interests.
On one hand, it is beneficial for consumers to be able to differentiate easily between products on the market. When you buy a Gucci handbag, a Ford Falcon or a Zumbo macaron, you are paying for certain qualities inherent to those products. If Target could call its clothes “Gucci” or a rival cafe could market “Zumbo Macarons”, the labels could no longer inform us about the products’ origins or characteristics.
On the other hand, as a rights-based society we are committed to freedom of expression and we aim to maintain the right of companies and individuals to use whichever words they like for whatever purposes they might choose.
The balance that has been struck by the trade mark system falls somewhere between the two.
In applying for a registered trade mark, Assange seeks to restrict others’ ability to use his name in certain circumstances.
One imagines the mark being used to prevent the sale of unauthorised Julian Assange tshirts or silver-haired bobble-heads. More realistically, Assange will rely on the mark to prevent hacker organisations and similar websites from suggesting affiliations with Assange without his consent.
However, trade mark owners have been known to push the boundaries of the protection further into the domain of genuine expression. Mattel famously took MCA Records to court over the use of the word “Barbie” in Aqua’s bubblegum pop song “Barbie Girl”. And Coca-Cola Co prevented a company from distributing posters alluding to the fact that the popular fizzy drink once contained cocaine.
If freedom of expression can be curtailed to accommodate Assange’s own rights, this begs the question whether there might be legitimate limits on the the type of information that should be WikiLeaked. The Afghan informants whose names and locations were leaked in mid-2010 might have something to say on that point.
If Assange’s philosophy is that freedom of information and expression should prevail at all costs, the trade mark application is a lot harder to explain.
A similar philosophical inconsistency in the pro-WikiLeaks camp came to light in December when “hacktivist” group Anonymous launched Operation Payback and Operation Avenge Assange to wreak revenge on organisations that had acted against Assange and WikiLeaks.
The hackers’ grandiloquent call to action declared that “Julian Assange deifies everything we hold dear. He despises and fights censorship constantly.” Readers were then implored to help to launch distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks on MasterCard, Visa, Swedish prosecutors, Swiss bank PostFinance and Sarah Palin amongst others.
In the case of MasterCard, the cyber-attack was accompanied by a misinformation campaign. Fellow hackers were given instructions on how to “spread word all over the web that MasterCard servers have been breached and that private account details have been revealed. Make it viral, make people panic out of control like the stock market, killing mastercard.”
Silencing disagreement, creating panic through misinformation and applying for control over the use of certain words seem like odd behaviours for absolutist defenders of transparency and freedom of expression.
Perhaps even Julian Assange believes in shades of grey.
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