A libertarian organization is threatening to sue Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, claiming his campaign stole its intellectual property.
Young Americans for Liberty, a nonprofit student activist organization, sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Sanders campaign, accusing it of stealing the organization’s brand “Operation Win at the Door” by calling its door-knocking operation the same thing.
“YAL launched Operation Win at the Door in 2018. Operation Win at the Door has knocked on over 1.5 million doors and secured 56 election victories,” writes Dan Backer, counsel for the libertarian group. “YAL has expended substantial resources in developing the name and goodwill associated with Operation Win at the Door. Your bastardization of our clients’ intellectual property and flagrant attempt to redistribute their hard-won goodwill — a product of tremendous labor on the part of our client — is unauthorized and un-American.”
The Washington Times obtained text messages from someone claiming to represent the Sanders campaign that encouraged people to join “the largest grassroots campaign in the country — Operation Win at the Door.”
YAL claims that the Sanders campaign is able to mislead the public into believing it has endorsed the socialist’s campaign, something it says is antithetical to the organization’s belief system. It further argued that the campaign’s use of the brand violates the law.
“This bald-faced deceit violates laws that prohibit such deceptive solicitations and protect donations for their intended use as well as infringes on the intellectual property rights of YAL,” the letter said.
The group plans to pursue legal action unless the Sanders campaign discontinues its use of the brand.
“Bernie’s campaign is using YAL’s ‘Operation Win at the Door’ branding to solicit door knockers via text message — branding that we’ve spent three years building. They must be realizing how much our strategy of engaging voters directly at the doorstep is impacting elections,” YAL president Cliff Maloney told the Washington Examiner in a statement.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Sanders campaign but did not receive a response for publication.
The letter follows recent news that supporters of the Sanders campaign sent threatening messages to Culinary Union officials online, over email, and in phone calls. On Twitter, union officials were called names such as “bitches,” “whore,” “f—ing scab,” and “evil, entitled assholes.” Over email, union officials were referred to as “corrupt mother f—ers” and were threatened that it was “time for people like me to go after you.”
Sanders has denounced the behavior and distanced himself from the incident.
“Obviously, that is not acceptable to me. And I don’t know who these so-called supporters are. You know, we are living in a strange world on the internet. … Anybody making personal attacks against anybody else in my name is not part of our movement,” he told PBS in an interview.
