It’s the silly season, and this is a case of dueling campaign ads.
Derrick Anderson, a GOP candidate for Congress in Virginia, is creating an impression in his campaign ads that he’s a family man. The thing is, he’s a bachelor, and he borrowed the mother and kids in his ads from a friend (see my posting here). There’s no disclaimer they’re not his.
Democrats have been having a field day with Anderson’s deception (e.g., the campaign video below). They’ve also used brief excerpts from Anderson’s ads to attack his honesty (watch, e.g., the Democratic video here).
That brought cease-and-desist letters from Anderson and the family appearing in his ads, who complain of unauthorized use of their image. Give me a break.
(I’m gonna assume here that Anderson has no problem with Trump using copyrighted music at his rallies without permission and over the objections of the artists.)
I’m not sure that falls within the “fair use” legal doctrine, but I’m pretty sure that using excerpts from Anderson’s ads to unmask the deception does.
If this family didn’t want to be in political ads, then they shouldn’t have volunteered to be in Anderson’s political ads. By doing that, they put themselves out there in public, and became fair game for comment.
They are literally helping him lie to voters, so I don’t think they have a legitimate complaint about Democrats displaying the picture they posed for to make their point that Anderson is pretending to have a family. It’s called “fair use.”