The Weatherproof outerwear company that had purchased an Associated Press photo of Barack Obama at the Great Wall of China, for a larger-than-life ad in which, to their great fortune, he was wearing their jacket, and so without his permission, built an ad campaign around it, pledged to take down the billboard in about two weeks, plenty of time to squeeze more attention out of it. “We need time to create a new ad campaign,” explained Freddie Stollmack, president of Weatherproof. “We can't have an empty billboard.” In the meantime, he said, the ad campaign had been “absolutely” the right thing to do. Legal experts say the incident shows that even though Americans all have the right to protect their image from unauthorized commercial use, for the president, it's trickier than most to pursue that right. And probably counterproductive more often than not, given the attention it draws. “The president probably has the narrowest ability of any of us to protect his image, because he's the most public person,” says trademark lawyer and intellectual property expert Anthony Biller.
