'LOL No:' Maker of 'FUCK THE LAPD' Shirt Laughs at Cops' Copyright Threat

Lawyers for the Los Angeles Police Department’s private foundation threatened a clothing company selling a “Fuck the LAPD” shirt, claiming that the union owns the copyright to the letters “LAPD” and asking that the shirt be taken off of the company’s store immediately. Lawyers for the clothing company, called Cola, responded with a letter that read, in its entirety, “LOL, no.” 

The shirts read “FUCK THE LAPD” emblazoned over a basketball, which is a play on the Los Angeles Lakers logo. Cola told me that they founded the company in 2019 “to counteract US mythology with simple visual statements.”

“Two prime examples of this are my Afghan Spring tee (re: making the world safe for democracy) and my Death to Destiny tee, which revises the white-supremacist American Progress painting by substituting the grim reaper for Columbia, thereby telling the truth about settler expansion,” they added.