Will Paramount object to Abdul El-Sayed’s apparent Blue’s Clues copyright violation?

One of the great innovations of the modern world is the ability to copyright or trademark intellectual property, thereby incentivizing creative ideas. However, if you’re a Democrat candidate, which nowadays pretty much means a socialist, little things like private property, including intellectual property, may not mean a lot to you.

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That could help explain why Abdul El-Sayed, who is running in Michigan to take a seat in the U.S. Senate, seems to have had no compunction about blatantly coopting Nickelodeon’s/Paramount’s Blue’s Clues to encourage mail-in voting, complete with an “Abdul for US Senate” promo at the end. What disturbs me most is Paramount’s complete silence (so far) in the face of what I’m pretty sure is classic copyright violation.

There are, of course, exceptions to copyright laws. One of those is the “fair use” exception. It allows people to make limited use of copyrighted material without permission for a legitimate commentary purpose.

For example, at American Thinker, we routinely include short passages from longer news and commentary articles as a starting point for our political commentary. We carefully attribute them to the original source, make no changes to them (other than ellipses), and invariably use only the smallest snippet necessary to make our point. This is classic “fair use.” You can see an example of this in my screen grab for this post, which I’m using to make a point about El-Sayed’s apparent copyright violation.

One of the other exceptions, which is actually a subset of “fair use,” is to parody something. However, that parody must be directed at a person, company, or product associated with the copyrighted item itself. For example, if I felt that the Blue’s Clues show was improperly advocating for euthanizing all blue dogs, I could create a short video with a sad pup who looks like Blue begging not to die.

What I cannot do, however, is use Blue, even a joking, parody version of Blue, to sell my cool blue toilet bowl cleaner. This is a very bright red (or perhaps blue) line in the law.

And that gets us to El-Sayed. He is an unsavory candidate, at least from my perspective. Although American-born, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed doesn’t seem to like America very much. He’s a radical leftist (Bernie Sanders endorsed him). His buddies are Linda Sarour, the pro-Gaza activist who kicked Jews out of the women’s march, and Hasan Piker, the Turkish-raised podcaster who hates America, capitalism, Jews, Israel, etc., and thinks Hezbollah, Hamas, and Mao are kind of cool.

Here are some of the things El-Sayed likes: socialized medicine, Gaza (by which I mean Hamas, which controls Gaza), public sector unions, and big taxes. Here are some of the things he hates: Israel, the United States military, ICE, and a secure border.

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It’s no mystery why I dislike him.

But even if I liked El-Sayed, I would probably find troubling what appears to be pure intellectual theft from Blue’s Clues, the Nickelodeon (now Paramount) children’s show. In it, a dorky man works with a blue cartoon dog to solve little puzzles aimed at the preschool set. The original man, Steve (seen in the clip below), has since been replaced by Josh, who’s hidden behind more copyright layers, so I couldn’t find a video of him. That’s important because, unlike Steve, who wears green, Josh wears blue:

Now you know.

And here is El-Sayed’s video, complete with Josh’s blue shirt, the Blue’s Clues cartoon set, the Blue’s song, and Blue herself, all shilling for El-Sayed’s candidacy:

The words cut off from the tweet are “such a weirdo.” But that’s beside the point. The point is that it seems entirely possible that this is blatant copyright theft.

And the question is this: Why hasn’t Paramount spoken up? I expect nothing less than property theft from El-Sayed, because socialists have no respect for private property, intellectual or otherwise. But one would think that Paramount Plus, which charges a small fortune for access to its content, would care.

But instead…crickets.

So, Paramount… when are you going to speak out and make El-Sayed stop what seems like completely unprotected intellectual theft?

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X screen grab.