Bavaria Film bans us from selling Wikileaks shirts

As you may remember, we have been selling T-shirts with the Wikileaks logo and the likeness of Julian Assange for many years. We have taken these shirts out of our range today. How did this come about? As we always do when we issue T-shirts to support projects that in turn serve the concerns of nerds all over the world, we donated almost all of the profits here too: EUR 5 per T-shirt went to the Wau Holland Foundation, which in turn passed the money on to Wikileaks. This has already raised a total of EUR 7500, which we have of course already transferred, as the screenshots in the products show. We had these shirts on offer:

This morning we received an email from Bavaria Film GmbH asking us to stop selling these shirts. Bavaria Film was apparently commissioned by Julian Assange to stop the sale of T-shirts for Wikileaks unless a license is purchased from Wikileaks. To this end, Julian Assange has apparently registered Wikileaks and the Wikileaks logo as a trademark. In principle, this is a perfectly understandable concern, because to be honest it also bothered us that so many freeloaders were selling T-shirts with the Wikileaks lettering or logo without donating a cent to Wikileaks. Although the email is not a lawyer's warning letter with costs, which could of course have been sent in theory, the tone of the email is not really friendly and in particular Bavaria Film doesn't say a word about the fact that we obviously put the shirts on to support Wikileaks. That's not nice, after all we are actually fighting for the same cause and we obviously don't have the T-shirts on offer to make a profit. Accordingly, we were not thrilled about the email and wrote back a little annoyed and asked for a license. Bavaria Film then very brashly refused to give us a license, which is why we had to take the shirts offline. Here is the email correspondence with Bavaria in detail (we have censored the names of the two employees, but of course we know them): 

Legally, the situation is clear: Julian Assange owns the "Wikileaks" brand and can decide alone who is allowed to sell T-shirts with it. However, the moral assessment does not necessarily have to follow suit. What do you think? Is it a legitimate concern? Should we have acted more kindly and at least been offered a license because of our previous donations? Or is everything OK as it is?

Update 21:03Since some people on our Facebook page have suggested that the emails are not coming from Bavaria: There is a press release on the subject from Bavaria Filmwhich also reveals a little more about the soon planned product portfolio with the Wikileaks logo.

Update 14.10, 22:16: Bavaria has apologized for the e-mails.