Political Campaign and Advocacy Media Toolkit: Clearance, Likeness, Platforms, and Disclaimers

By Casey Scott McKay · 2024-08-09

A campaign advertisement is assembled at speed, from other people's material, by an organisation that will disband after the election. It is then published to an audience actively looking for reasons to complain. This toolkit assembles the working material for practitioners advising campaigns, advocacy organisations, political committees, and the agencies that serve them. It covers music and footage clearance and why the usual assumptions fail, together with the likeness, endorsement, and defamation exposure that follows from featuring a real person. It works through parody and fair use as campaigns actually use them, the platform policies that function as private regulation, and the disclaimer and synthetic media rules now in force. It closes with a rapid response protocol measured in hours, the asset ownership problem at wind-up, clause language, and the failures that recur.

IP and Technology > Internet | Toolkit | Published 9 August 2024 - Updated 15 October 2024 | Casey Scott McKay - marksy.us

Summary. A campaign advertisement is assembled at speed from other people's material by an organisation that will not exist next year. This toolkit covers music and footage clearance, news clip use, candidate and third-party likeness, false endorsement, parody and fair use as campaigns actually use them, platform political advertising policies and disclaimer requirements, synthetic media disclosure, takedown response on a compressed timetable, and the asset ownership problem that surfaces when the campaign winds up.

Keywords: political advertising · music clearance · footage licensing · news clips · candidate likeness · right of publicity · false endorsement · parody and fair use · platform ad policies · disclaimers · takedown response · synthetic media · opposition research · volunteer content · asset ownership · rapid response

Start Here

Political media is ordinary content law under extraordinary conditions, and the conditions are what make it difficult.

The timetable is compressed. An advertisement conceived on Monday runs on Wednesday. There is no clearance cycle, and the clearance decisions are made by whoever is awake.

The organisation is temporary. A campaign committee exists for a season, holds few assets, has volunteer contributors and vendor relationships documented lightly, and dissolves. Chain of title is an afterthought and rights survive the entity.

The audience is adversarial. Opponents, artists, journalists, and platforms are all watching, and a rights complaint is a news story before it is a legal claim. The reputational consequence frequently exceeds the legal one.

And the speech is political, which affects the analysis genuinely but far less than campaigns assume. The First Amendment protects a great deal of political expression; it does not license a campaign to use a musician's recording, and campaigns lose that argument regularly.

Four questions organise the work.

Is every element in the piece cleared?

Does featuring this person create a likeness or endorsement problem?

What do the platform rules require?

And what happens in the four hours after a complaint arrives?

See Nobody Cleared the Soundtrack for the doctrinal treatment, Advising a Political Campaign or Advocacy Organisation for the sequence, and the Campaign and Advocacy Content Checklist for the working list.

Part one: music, and why the assumptions fail

Music is the single most common rights failure in political media, and the reasons are structural.

Two copyrights, again. The composition and the sound recording, owned separately and licensed separately. A licence for one is not a licence for the other. See Two Copyrights, One Song and the Music Clearance Checklist.

Rally use and advertisement use are different. Playing a recording at a rally is a public performance under 17 U.S.C. § 106(4). A venue's blanket licence may cover it, and performing rights organisations offer political entity licences precisely because the question arises. Using the recording in an advertisement requires synchronisation and master use licences, negotiated directly with the publisher and the label, and those are frequently refused.

Refusal is the norm, not the exception. Artists decline political uses routinely, and a licence obtained through an agency without the artist's knowledge produces a public objection even where the paperwork is sound.

The artist has claims beyond copyright. Right of publicity, false endorsement under 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a), and, where a distinctive voice is imitated, the analysis in Midler v. Ford Motor Co. and Waits v. Frito-Lay, Inc.. A campaign that licenses a composition and hires a sound-alike has not solved the problem.

Performing rights organisation political licences can be withdrawn for specific works at an artist's request, which is a mechanism artists use and campaigns discover mid-tour.

Production music is the answer for advertisements: catalogues cleared for political use, at a fraction of the cost and with no objection risk. Campaigns resist because the familiar song is the point, and the familiar song is precisely what cannot be had.

Commission original music where the budget allows, with a full buy-out and a written assignment.

And record the licence with the specific work, the specific use, the term, the territory, and the media. A licence for "campaign use" that does not mention digital advertising will not cover it.

Part two: footage, images, and news material

News clips are the second most common failure. A broadcast segment is a copyrighted audiovisual work owned by the broadcaster, and using thirty seconds of it in an advertisement is reproduction and public display.

Fair use is available and is not a plan. 17 U.S.C. § 107 supports commentary and criticism, and a campaign advertisement using a news clip to criticise the reporting or the subject has a genuine argument. After Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, the first factor asks whether the use has a distinct purpose and does not merely substitute; a clip used to make the same point the broadcaster made is weaker than one used to criticise it. Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. remains the parody framework, and Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises is a reminder that the fourth factor bites hardest with unpublished and newsworthy material. See Fair Use After Warhol and Running a Fair Use Analysis.

Broadcasters object routinely, both to protect the copyright and to protect the appearance of neutrality, and their takedown notices arrive quickly.

Stock footage and photography licences must cover political and advocacy use, which many expressly exclude, and must cover the territories and media used.

Photographs of the opposing candidate are owned by the photographer. A press image lifted from a news site is infringement, and the fact that the subject is a public figure changes nothing about who owns the photograph.

Crowd and event footage shot by the campaign is cleanest, and requires releases from anybody featured prominently.

Volunteer and supporter content is owned by the volunteer unless assigned. A user-generated content programme needs terms granting a licence, and the terms must be presented before submission.

Archival and government material may be free of copyright where produced by the federal government under 17 U.S.C. § 105, and state and local material generally is not.

And opposition research footage — trackers filming public appearances — is the campaign's own work and should be assigned by the tracker, who is usually a contractor.

Part three: likeness, endorsement, and defamation

Right of publicity is state law and varies, and its application to political speech varies with it. Most states recognise a newsworthiness or public affairs exception that covers genuine political commentary; none of them treats a campaign advertisement as automatically exempt.

The distinction that matters is commentary versus endorsement. Depicting an opponent to criticise them is core political speech. Depicting a third party — a celebrity, a musician, a local business owner — in a way suggesting they support the campaign is a false endorsement claim under 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a) and a publicity claim in most states.

Get endorsement in writing. A supporter who appears in an advertisement should sign a release covering the use, the media, the term, and the territory, and it should say that the endorsement may be withdrawn only prospectively. Endorsers change their minds during campaigns.

Ordinary people in advertisements need releases too, and a testimonial from a member of the public used without one is the easiest claim in this field.

Defamation is the parallel exposure. A false statement of fact about an identifiable person, published with the requisite fault, is actionable. Public officials and public figures must show actual malice under New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts, which protects a great deal of campaign speech and does not protect a fabricated quotation. Opinion is protected where it does not imply undisclosed defamatory facts, following Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co.. See The Sentence That Costs You and Managing Defamation and Content Liability.

Private individuals featured in advertisements — a constituent in an anecdote, a business owner in a case study — are not public figures, and the fault standard is lower.

Anti-SLAPP statutes exist in many states and are a meaningful defensive tool against claims brought to suppress political speech; their availability and procedure vary and they should be identified before a complaint is answered.

Trademark parody of a company's marks in advocacy content runs through the Rogers v. Grimaldi line as narrowed by Jack Daniel's Properties, Inc. v. VIP Products LLC, which held that the Rogers test does not apply where the mark is used as a source identifier. A protest group using a company's logo to criticise it is generally on strong ground; one using it as a badge on merchandise is not. See Rogers, Jack Daniel's, and the Trademark Parody Problem and the Expressive Use and Parody Risk Checklist.

And synthetic media is now regulated in several states, with disclosure requirements for manipulated depictions of candidates within defined periods before an election, and with private rights of action in some. Any use of generated or altered imagery of a real person requires a jurisdiction check before publication.

Part four: platforms, disclaimers, and private regulation

Platform policies do more day-to-day work in this field than any statute.

Political advertising policies vary by platform and change frequently: some prohibit political advertising entirely, some require advertiser verification and a disclaimer, some restrict targeting criteria, and some maintain public ad libraries in which every advertisement and its spend are visible.

Verification takes time. A campaign that has not completed advertiser verification cannot run advertisements, and the process is measured in days.

Disclaimer requirements exist both in law and in platform policy, and the two do not always align. Federal and state rules require attribution on political communications; platforms require their own formats. Build the disclaimer into the creative rather than adding it at upload.

Ad libraries are opposition research. Everything a campaign runs is visible to its opponents, journalists, and researchers, including targeting parameters in some libraries. Assume publication.

Organic content is governed by the ordinary content policies, and a piece that would run as an advertisement may still be removed as organic content for a policy breach.

Copyright takedowns on platforms run through the notice and takedown process under 17 U.S.C. § 512, and a campaign's video can disappear within hours of a rights holder's notice, at the worst possible moment. Counter-notification restores content after a statutory waiting period that is longer than most campaign news cycles. See the DMCA Takedown Notice Checklist.

Repeat infringer policies can jeopardise an account entirely, which is a catastrophic outcome for a campaign mid-cycle.

Platform appeals are slow and opaque, and the practical remedy is usually to re-publish a corrected version rather than to fight.

Broadcast and cable carry their own regimes, including reasonable access and equal opportunity obligations for candidate advertising, and station clearance standards that operate independently of legal analysis. A station may refuse an advertisement on rights grounds even where the campaign's analysis is sound.

And content moderation generally shapes what advocacy organisations can publish; see Deciding What Stays Up and the Content Moderation and Platform Policy Toolkit.

Part five: the rapid response protocol

A rights complaint in a campaign is a communications event with a legal component, and the first four hours decide the outcome.

Name the decision-maker in advance. One person, reachable, with authority to pull content. In a campaign that person is usually not a lawyer, and they need a written protocol.

Triage in three questions. Is the complaint from a rights holder or from an opponent? Is the underlying claim strong, arguable, or weak? And is the content still delivering value, or has it run its course?

Pull weak content immediately. A campaign that fights a losing rights claim over an advertisement that has already had its run has chosen a week of bad coverage in exchange for nothing.

Fight arguable claims selectively, and only where the content matters and where the argument is genuinely good — a real fair use position on a news clip used for criticism, for example.

Never fight an artist publicly. Even where the licence is sound, a musician's objection is a story the campaign cannot win. Replace the music.

Respond in writing, quickly, and without escalation. A short letter acknowledging receipt, stating the position, and confirming what has been done buys more goodwill than silence.

Preserve everything. The content as published, the clearance file, the licence, the internal correspondence, and the complaint. This is a litigation hold in miniature.

Prepare the substitute in parallel. The fastest resolution is a corrected version published within hours, and having the alternative music track and the licensed image already selected turns a crisis into an edit.

Coordinate with communications, and agree the line before anybody speaks.

And record the lesson. A campaign that pulls one advertisement for an uncleared track and repeats the error a fortnight later has a process problem, not a bad-luck problem.

Part six: assets, vendors, and the wind-up

Campaigns end, and what they created outlives them.

Agency and consultant agreements should assign the creative work, and frequently do not. A campaign that commissioned a logo, a video, and a website from three vendors on purchase orders owns none of them. See Whose Campaign Is It? and the Agency Engagement Checklist.

Volunteers own what they create unless they assign it. A volunteer-designed graphic used in a national advertisement is somebody's copyright.

Photographers and videographers engaged for events retain copyright absent assignment, and their images are the ones reused for years.

The campaign name and logo may be registrable, and for a recurring candidate or a durable advocacy organisation they should be. For a single-cycle committee they usually are not, and the practical protection is domain and handle control.

Domains and social handles should be registered by the entity rather than by a staff member, and the recurring failure is an account controlled by somebody who left in March.

Data assets — supporter lists, donor records, and volunteer databases — are the most valuable thing a campaign builds, and their transfer, sale, or reuse is regulated separately and constrained by the privacy notice given at collection.

Third-party licences do not survive the campaign. A licence granted for use during a cycle does not permit a documentary, a retrospective, or a subsequent campaign to use the same material.

Wind-up should include an asset schedule: what was created, who owns it, what is licensed and until when, and where the files are. It takes a day and it is almost never done.

And for advocacy organisations that persist, the discipline is the ordinary brand and content discipline of any publisher: registered marks, assigned work, licensed assets, and a clearance record that can be produced.

Clause bank

Volunteer and supporter content licence. By submitting content to the Campaign you grant the Campaign a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable licence to reproduce, adapt, publish, and display it in Campaign communications in any medium. You confirm that you created the content, that it does not infringe the rights of any third party, that any person identifiable in it has consented to this use, and that any music, footage, or image included is either yours or licensed for this purpose. You retain ownership of your content. The Campaign is not obliged to use it and may remove it at any time.

Vendor assignment for campaign creative. Vendor hereby irrevocably assigns to the Committee all right, title and interest in all Deliverables, including all copyright and all rights in any design, and waives all moral rights to the fullest extent permitted, with a consent as fallback. Vendor shall deliver a Third-Party Asset Schedule identifying every image, footage clip, font, music track, and other licensed element incorporated in each Deliverable, with the licensor, the licence reference, the permitted uses, the term, and the territory. Vendor warrants that each such licence expressly permits political and advocacy use. Vendor shall procure equivalent assignments from every subcontractor and shall identify each subcontractor before engagement.

Endorser release. I consent to the Committee using my name, image, likeness, voice, and the statements I have made in Campaign communications, in any medium, during the [election cycle]. I confirm the statements attributed to me are accurate and are my own. I understand my endorsement will be presented as such. I may withdraw my consent by written notice, in which case the Committee shall cease including me in newly produced or newly placed communications within [5] business days, but is not obliged to recall materials already distributed or placed.

Clearance record. No item shall be published until the Clearance Record for it is complete. The record shall identify, for each element: the element; its source; the licence, release, or exception relied on; the person who cleared it; and the date. Where fair use is relied on, the record shall state the purpose of the use, the amount taken, and why the use does not substitute for the original. The record shall be retained for [3] years after the end of the cycle.

Rapid response authority. The Content Officer named at Schedule [A] has authority to withdraw any published item immediately, without further approval, on receipt of a rights complaint. Withdrawal is not an admission. The Content Officer shall, within [4] hours of a complaint: acknowledge receipt in writing; secure and preserve the item as published, its Clearance Record, and all related correspondence; determine whether to withdraw, replace, or maintain; and notify Communications and Counsel. No other person shall respond to the complainant.

Worked scenarios

The rally song. A campaign plays a well-known recording at rallies under a venue licence and a political entity licence from a performing rights organisation. The artist objects publicly. The legal position is defensible: the composition is licensed for public performance. The artist's remedy is to request withdrawal of the work from the political licence, which they do, and to make a statement, which they also do. The campaign changes the song. The lesson is that the licence answered the copyright question and did not answer the question that mattered.

The news clip. An advertisement uses eighteen seconds of a network segment to criticise the network's framing of an issue. The network sends a takedown notice. The fair use argument is genuinely strong — criticism of the source, a small portion, a distinct purpose, no market substitution. The campaign counter-notifies. The platform restores the content after the statutory waiting period, by which time the news cycle has moved. The campaign's better option was to publish a version using its own footage of the same event, prepared in advance.

The constituent testimonial. An advertisement features a local business owner describing a policy's effect. No release was signed; the footage came from a public meeting. The business owner is a private individual, disagrees with the campaign, and objects. The claim is publicity and, depending on what was implied, false endorsement. The advertisement is pulled within a day. A one-page release, signed at the meeting, would have prevented it entirely.

The vendor who owns the logo. A campaign's designer produced the logo on a purchase order with no assignment. The candidate runs again four years later and the designer, now working for a rival, declines to licence it. The logo is the campaign's most recognisable asset and it belongs to somebody else. The assignment clause was available at the outset for nothing.

Failures that recur

A recording used in an advertisement with only a performance licence.

A composition licensed and a sound-alike recorded, producing a voice claim.

News footage used without a fair use assessment recorded anywhere.

Press photographs of the opponent lifted from a news site.

Stock licences that exclude political use.

Volunteer content published with no submission terms.

Testimonials filmed without releases.

Endorsers featured after they have withdrawn, because nobody built a withdrawal process.

Disclaimers added at upload and cropped by the platform's aspect ratio.

Advertiser verification not completed before the media buy.

No named person with authority to pull content, so a complaint circulates for a day.

Vendor deliverables never assigned.

Domains and social handles held by a departed staff member.

And synthetic imagery published without checking the state disclosure rules.

Part seven: building a clearance function inside a campaign

Campaigns do not have clearance departments and cannot build one. What they can build is a small number of habits that survive the pace.

One clearance owner. A single person, not necessarily a lawyer, who signs off before anything is published. In a small campaign this is the digital director; in a large one it is a dedicated role. What matters is that it is one person and that everybody knows who.

A pre-cleared asset library. Production music licensed for political use, stock imagery with the right licence, and the campaign's own photography. Most content can be assembled from it, which removes most of the risk and most of the delay. Build it in the first month.

A one-page rule sheet for the creative team: use the library; if you want something outside it, ask before you cut; never use a news clip, a press photograph, or a commercial recording without asking; never use a person's image without a release.

A release in every field organiser's bag. Testimonials are filmed opportunistically and the release has to be available at that moment.

A licence file, one folder, one row per asset, with the licence document attached. It takes minutes per asset and it is the whole defence.

A pre-approved substitution kit: an alternative music bed, a licensed image set, and a template for a corrected version, so that a takedown produces a replacement within hours.

A weekly ten-minute review between the clearance owner and counsel, which catches most problems before they publish.

And an escalation number. The person who needs advice at eleven at night on a Sunday needs a number rather than an email address.

None of this is sophisticated. All of it is the difference between a campaign that loses an advertisement and one that loses a week.

Part eight: advocacy organisations and the longer horizon

Permanent advocacy organisations face the same content questions on a different timescale, and the answers change.

Register the marks. An organisation that will exist for decades should own its name, its logo, and its campaign names as registered trademarks under 15 U.S.C. § 1051, and should police them, because campaign names are adopted by opponents and by unrelated groups.

Own the archive. Photography, video, reports, and design accumulated over years is a genuine asset, and its chain of title should be maintained rather than reconstructed. Assign from every staff member, contractor, and volunteer.

Licence outward deliberately. Advocacy material is meant to spread, and an organisation that wants its graphics shared should say so with an express permission or an open licence rather than relying on nobody objecting.

Manage the coalition problem. Joint campaigns with partner organisations produce jointly created material with no ownership allocation, and the allocation should be agreed before the campaign rather than when a partner wants to reuse an asset.

Handle donor and supporter data under a privacy programme, since it is the organisation's most sensitive holding and its most valuable. See Building a Privacy Compliance Program for a Consumer Brand.

Prepare for adversarial scrutiny. Advocacy organisations attract opposition research directed at their own materials, and a substantiation file for every factual claim is both good practice and a defence.

Budget for content liability insurance, which is available, is cheaper than a single defence, and which many organisations discover they lack at the worst moment. See the Defamation and Content Liability Toolkit.

And build the pre-publication review into the editorial process rather than bolting it on, because an organisation publishing continuously cannot run a clearance gate designed for a campaign's occasional advertisement.

Part nine: synthetic media

Generated and altered media is now the fastest-moving part of this practice and the one where advice ages quickest.

Several states now require disclosure of synthetic or manipulated depictions of candidates in political communications, typically within a defined period before an election, with varying definitions, varying exemptions for satire and parody, and varying enforcement mechanisms including private rights of action.

Platform policies are stricter than the statutes in several respects, requiring labelling of realistic synthetic content and prohibiting some categories outright. Compliance with the law is not compliance with the platform.

The underlying claims are the familiar ones. Depicting a real person without consent engages publicity and false endorsement; a false factual assertion conveyed by a fabricated depiction engages defamation, with the actual malice standard from New York Times Co. v. Sullivan applying to public figures; and a fabricated quotation attributed to a real person is not opinion.

Parody and satire have real protection — Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell is the reference point — and the protection depends on the audience understanding that the depiction is not real, which is precisely what realistic synthesis defeats.

Label clearly and prominently, in the creative rather than in a caption that a platform will crop.

Do not synthesise a real person's voice. The voice claims from Midler v. Ford Motor Co. and Waits v. Frito-Lay, Inc. predate the technology and apply directly to it.

Check the tool's terms, since generation platforms restrict political use and some prohibit depictions of real people entirely, and a breach is both a contract problem and an evidentiary one.

Record the provenance of any generated asset: the tool, the prompt, the date, and the human review. See Who Owns What the Machine Made and the Generative AI IP Compliance Checklist.

And treat the rule as changing. A jurisdiction check before publication is not a one-time exercise in this area; it is a per-cycle and sometimes a per-month exercise.

The four-hour test

The quickest diagnostic on a campaign's content readiness takes four hours and should be run before the first advertisement airs.

Pick the most prominent piece of published content and ask five things. Can somebody produce the licence for the music, the footage, and every image in it, within ten minutes? Is there a signed release for every identifiable person featured? If fair use is being relied on anywhere, is there a written note saying why? Who has authority to pull this content right now, and can they be reached on a Sunday? And if it were taken down at eight tomorrow morning, what is the replacement and how long would it take to publish?

A campaign that answers all five is unusually well run. A campaign that answers two is the ordinary case. A campaign that answers none is one letter away from spending a week of its remaining time on a problem that a folder and a phone number would have prevented.

One paragraph to remember

Political speech is well protected and does not include a licence to use somebody's recording, footage, photograph, or face. Build a pre-cleared asset library in the first month and assemble almost everything from it; get releases for every person who appears; write down the fair use reasoning whenever you rely on it; complete platform verification before the media buy; name one person with authority to pull content and give the team their phone number; and assign every vendor deliverable in writing, because the logo, the video, and the website will outlive the committee that paid for them.

Content types, and what each requires

A short reference for the formats a campaign actually produces.

Broadcast and cable advertisement. Full clearance for every element; station standards review; disclaimer in the required format and duration; music licensed for sync and master; footage licensed or fair use documented; releases for every identifiable person.

Digital video advertisement. Everything above, plus platform advertising policy compliance, advertiser verification, disclaimer visible at the platform's aspect ratios, and awareness that it will appear in a public ad library.

Organic social post. Lower formality and the same underlying rights. The recurring failure is a supporter's photograph or a news image reposted without permission.

Email and direct mail. Images and quotations are the exposure; attribution requirements apply; and mail carries its own disclaimer rules.

Website and landing pages. Fonts, stock imagery, embedded video, and any map or chart taken from a published source. See The Legal Layers of a Website.

Merchandise. A wholly different analysis, because merchandise is a commercial good rather than political speech, and third-party marks or imagery on a t-shirt lose most of the expressive-use protection they would have in an advertisement.

Live events. Music performance licences, venue terms, filming rights, and releases for attendees appearing in footage.

Debate and speech clips of the campaign's own candidate, recorded by broadcasters, which the campaign does not own.

Opposition research footage, owned by whoever filmed it, which should be a contractor under an assignment.

And rapid response content, produced in an hour to answer something that happened in the last one. This is where every rule is broken, which is why the pre-cleared library and the substitution kit exist.

A note on advising campaigns

Campaign clients are unlike other clients in ways that change how advice has to be delivered.

Speed beats completeness. An answer in twenty minutes that is right on the main point is worth more than a memorandum in two days. Say what can be published, what cannot, and what needs a change, in that order.

The client is not a lawyer and is not going to become one. Advice framed as doctrine will not be applied. Advice framed as "use the library track, not that one" will be.

The decision-maker may be twenty-four years old and running the digital operation on four hours of sleep. Give them a rule they can apply without calling, and a number for when they cannot.

Reputation is the operative risk. A campaign will accept a legal risk it would never accept commercially, and will refuse a legally safe course that looks bad. Advise on both, and be explicit about which is which.

Everything is public eventually. Internal correspondence in campaigns leaks with some regularity. Write accordingly.

The organisation dissolves. Advice about what happens after the cycle will be ignored during it, which is why the vendor assignments and the domain registrations have to be handled at the start, when nobody is busy yet.

And be even-handed about the merits. The rights analysis for an advertisement does not change with the politics of the campaign running it, and a practitioner whose advice varies with their sympathies is not giving advice.

A closing observation

The recurring shape of trouble in this field is a campaign that had a defensible legal position and lost anyway.

The rally music was licensed and the artist objected. The news clip was arguably fair use and the platform removed it for four days. The testimonial was truthful and the speaker changed their mind. In each case the law supported the campaign and the outcome did not, because the currency in political media is attention and the complaint is the story.

Which produces the practical conclusion that runs through this entire toolkit: in political media the clearance work is not primarily about winning a legal argument. It is about never having to have one during the eight weeks that matter. A pre-cleared library, a folder of releases, and a named person with a telephone are not sophisticated legal instruments. They are what allows a campaign to spend the final stretch talking about its candidate rather than about its soundtrack.

Key Authorities at a Glance

Copyright. 17 U.S.C. § 102; 17 U.S.C. § 105 on federal government works; 17 U.S.C. § 106 including public performance; 17 U.S.C. § 107 with Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith; 17 U.S.C. § 512 on notice and takedown; 17 U.S.C. § 201 and 17 U.S.C. § 204 on ownership and transfers; 17 U.S.C. § 101 on work made for hire.

Trademark and endorsement. 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a) for false endorsement and false advertising; 15 U.S.C. § 1114; expressive use under Rogers v. Grimaldi as limited by Jack Daniel's Properties, Inc. v. VIP Products LLC; nominative fair use under New Kids on the Block v. News America Publishing, Inc..

Publicity and voice. State right of publicity statutes and common law; Zacchini v. Scripps-Howard Broadcasting Co.; Midler v. Ford Motor Co.; Waits v. Frito-Lay, Inc..

Defamation and political speech. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan; Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts; Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc.; Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co.; Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell on parody and emotional distress.

Platform immunity and moderation. 47 U.S.C. § 230 for the platform's position, which does not protect the campaign as the content's author.

Disclosure and synthetic media. State statutes requiring disclosure of manipulated depictions of candidates; see Synthetic Media Election Laws. Advertising disclaimer requirements arise under campaign finance law and platform policy.

| Authority | Governs | Practical consequence | | --- | --- | --- | | 17 U.S.C. § 106(4) | Public performance | Rally use versus advertisement use | | Sync and master rights | Advertisements | Direct licences, frequently refused | | 17 U.S.C. § 107 | Fair use | Real for criticism, not a plan | | Warhol v. Goldsmith | Purpose and substitution | Same-purpose use is weaker | | 17 U.S.C. § 512 | Takedown | Content vanishes within hours | | 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a) | False endorsement | Featuring a person implies support | | Midler; Waits | Voice | Sound-alikes do not solve it | | Sullivan | Defamation | Actual malice for public figures | | Milkovich | Opinion | No blanket opinion privilege | | Jack Daniel's | Parody | Source-identifying use loses Rogers | | 17 U.S.C. § 105 | Government works | Federal material may be free | | 17 U.S.C. § 204 | Transfers | No writing, no assignment |