Illustration: Peter C. Espina
When Zhu Baolai, an entrepreneurial sophomore at Beijing City University, defended his Obama Fried Chicken (OFC) restaurant in northwest Beijing's Haidian district, he unwittingly summed up China's intellectual property rights laws in a nutshell. As the riddle goes, "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Perhaps we can lament, "if a shanzhai (knockoff) restaurant opens in Beijing and no foreign correspondent reports it, is it really wrong?"
Unfortunately in this instance, there were several around to see OFC, which has since been renamed "UFO." Now, Colonel Sanders' Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) empire is threatening to sue the outlet adorned with the US President's face in some kind of horrible alphabet punch up.
But this is one of the few instances where I'll actually stand up and support the young intellectual property thief. KFC might have a trademark on positioning of the logo and, in hindsight, the emblazoned red sign wasn't the best way to go. But bless his sweaty, batter-encrusted socks, if no one had noticed, he'd be making greasy students happy for years. There are already two OFC restaurants still trading in New York, one in Harlem and one in Brooklyn. Surely, this topic is old news?
The letters "FC" are no more of a copyright for fried chicken restaurants than they are for the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) or Chelsea Football Club (CFC.) In this instance, the young man went to a great deal of trouble to depict Barack Obama's smiling face by painting it himself, without resorting to an online photo.
This of course begs the question: is Obama's likeness copyrighted? Could the world leader sue this small fried chicken outlet for abuse of his presidential features? The answer is probably no. The Associated Press once tried to sue painter Shepard Fairey, who used one of the news agency's photographs of Obama as a likeness for a portrait in his Hope poster, ala Che Guevara. The argument arose that the painting was the artist's own work, transforming a likeness into a work of art, an intellectual property all of its own.
Why not let the young restaurateur claim the same thing? He has painstakingly crafted the likeness of a US president by hand. If they force him to take it down and send it to the Tate Modern art gallery, it's certainly a lot more worthy than Tracey Emin's soiled bed sheets, which have been replicated many times by Sanlitun drunks.
Sure, it bears a likeness to the style in which Colonel Sanders appears on KFC's logo, but then surely this is a wonderful commentary on the political state of capitalism today.
Leave the poor student alone, I say. He's making a quick kuai and serving up some cheap food for his compatriots. The last thing he needs is a McLibel-style law battle over intellectual property. It's not like his one restaurant is going to put fast-food giant KFC, which has 3,200 outlets in 650 Chinese cities, out of business.
If he really wants a quick escape, start using local chickens and call PETA to investigate KFC's notorious battery hens all around the world, which should deflect some of the flack for a while. Good luck to student Zhu and his fledgling OFC empire. Let's just hope no one mentions the race issue, a bombshell that could ruffle more feathers in the fried chicken war.