Superdelegates and nonprofit trademark dilution

Speak of the devil and he shall appear, the saying goes, and here's a perfect example: GOP.com's new SuperDonkey flash video, which appropriates others' intellectual property to solicit donations for the Republican Party.

Were Time Warner to send a C&D on the grounds that the video dilutes a famous mark, they wouldn't have a bad case. The parody exception arguably wouldn't save this, nor, given the overt fundraising, contending that this constitutes a noncommercial use.

Add to that the lift of a graphic from the Super Friends cartoon and you have an all too common scenario in the nonprofit world: the assumption that your organization is free to use commercial IP to market itself. One popular argument for letting stuff like this go: free speech and the sense of an implicit difference between the for-profit and nonprofit worlds.

Yet there are also implications for the claim that nonprofits by their very nature support the rule of law. If we're good with the law except when it works to our own disadvantage, how does this make us different from anyone else?