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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE / May 15th, 2003, 20:00 PST
Contact: Daniel Burton, (510) 504-8708, dan@spaz.org
BERKELEY, CA — Black Rock City, LLC, the company holding the "Burning Man" trademark has filed a VeRO request with eBay, resulting in the removal of two auctions containing the phrase "Burning Man." Using the phrase "Burning Man" in connection with selling a commercial product, it says, upsets participants in the festival, at which all commercial sales are banned. However, Black Rock City, LLC is itself in the business of selling commercial products using the name "Burning Man" — expensive tickets to the festival, which currently retail at $225 — more than many of the artists who supported the festival in its early years can afford.
"Burning Man itself has become a commercial product, and an expensive one at that," says Daniel Burton, the eBay seller. "It is hypocritical of people who are selling $225 tickets to an event supposedly based on a 'gift economy' to try to censor auction listings that merely suggest the product is good for Burning Man somewhere, but don't claim to be tickets or official merchandise."
The two listings, under the ID melchizedek_merchandise, were for pairs of hand-made fairy wings "by Imagination Creations" and had titles that read "Fairy Wings & Crown-Ren Fair/Goth/Burning Man" and "Red Fire Fairy Wings-for Burning Man/Rave/etc." Burton says he had seen similar listings in the past and was just trying to tell people what the wings might be good for. He was surprised when he was contacted by Jim Graham (ronjon@burningman.com), Burning Man's "Media Mogul," citing the trademark, and thought it was strange that there even was a trademark for "Burning Man," an ostensibly non-commercial event.
Burton, who has had trouble finding work since he graduated from college with a Computer Science degree in December 2000, says he would like to go to Burning Man but cannot afford it. A past Libertarian Candidate for State Assembly (2000) and a self-described "socially-conscious anarchist," he is a strong believer in free speech and staunch opponent of over-reaching intellectual property law.
"The idea that any one group can own, control, and censor the words 'Burning Man,'" he says, "is completely counter to the original anarchic spirit of Burning Man. What happened to the concept that there are no spectators, that everyone is equally involved? What happened to the idea that Burning Man is not just another carnival put on by some production company where passive audiences pay for entertainment? If things have reached the point at which some official organization puts up fences, charges admission, and censors use of the words 'Burning Man,' things have effectively reached that point. Burning Man has sold out — not to any corporation, but to a market of wealthy yuppies and spectators itself."
"Burning Man would like to isolate itself from economic inequality — but in the outside world economic differences have impact. People have to make money to subsist, and lofty notions of a 'gift economy' won't make that money. Black Rock City, LLC doesn't even offer discounted tickets to low-income people, something that almost every non-commercial social service organization does with its services. I was just trying to make enough money to pay rent by teaming up with a struggling artist and selling her works online, and I'm barely breaking even — is this wrong?"
In fact, Black Rock City, LLC is not registered as a non-profit, but a for-profit joint stock company, owned by six individuals. Despite all the talk about participatory decision-making, the LLC agreement makes no mention of it and gives ultimate decision-making authority to a council of managers.
"In other words, the participatory part can be eliminated at their discretion," Burton says. "There is no excuse for doing things this way. Other festivals like the Rainbow Gathering, Autonomous Mutant Festival and so on have all operated as informal, horizontal networks, without official hierarchies, for years, remained free, operated on Federal land without permits, and avoided being shut down, all with no signs of changing — and mostly because of the determination of the organizers, which I don't see in Burning Man."
Burton does not believe "Burning Man" is a term that should be protected as a trademark and is considering a lawsuit to invalidate it. He contends that the term "Burning Man" was in common use referring to more than just a commercial product long before it was registered as a trademark.
"I've been around long enough to remember when Burning Man actually was a sort of temporary autonomous zone," Burton says. "From the very beginning 'Burning Man' has always referred to the entire gathering and the efforts of all who participate in it in creating the spectacle — not just a select organization and the tickets they sell."
Besides this, he says, Black Rock City, LLC actually only holds a service mark, a type of trademark which only protects services rendered, in this case organizing festivals, and not physical goods. "I'm not selling the same type of product at all and there's no way anyone could mistake these wings for Burning Man tickets or official merchandise," he says.
Burton plans to challenge the VeRO request on eBay, and says he will use the phrase "Burning Man" in future listings. If he can't sell his merchandise on eBay, he says, he will offer it for sale elsewhere just to prove his point. If he can't use the web, he says, he will turn to peer-to-peer file-sharing and e-mail. He has other plans which he describes as "a mix of civil disobedience, hacktivism, and other unspecified actions which you can neither anticipate nor imagine," if Black Rock City, LLC does not back down. He has registered the domain burningmantrademark.org, which is not online at the time of this release, but his website can be found at http://www.spaz.org/~dan/burningmantrademark/
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