This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

A campaigner for the public health system has received a lawyer’s letter from the department of human services accusing him of “misleading or deceptive” use of the Medicare logo and name on his savemedicare.org website.

The Australian government solicitor wrote to campaigner Mark Rogers on behalf of the department on 16 November demanding he remove the Medicare logo and “deceptively similar branding” and cancel the domain name of the website.

Rogers said the department’s aggressive defence of the Medicare brand was designed to shut down his advocacy to boost funding for the public health system.



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The controversy comes after police dropped an investigation against the Labor party for sending text messages during the election campaign which appeared to be sent from Medicare, dubbed the “Mediscare”.

The letter said Rogers had used “the Save Medicare logo incorporating the distinctive green and yellow Medicare branding and colour scheme at the top of each page”.

“You are also using revolving banners on the website that reproduce the Medicare logo and colour scheme.”

The banners contain the name of the health service in messages such as “more Medicare not less”, “keep Medicare universal” and “keep Medicare public”.

The letter notes savemedicare.org is not authorised to use the logo. It claims the banners breach the department’s copyright in the Medicare logo and are “misleading or deceptive”.

Rogers told Guardian Australia he created the website for the Save Medicare Sydney group in December 2014, well before the July “Mediscare” election, because he believed the government was “going in the wrong direction” by proposing a co-payment for GP visits.

“I don’t have the actual true Medicare logo [on the website], just the same colours with the words Save Medicare.”

“I can’t see how any thinking person could think I am pretending to be Medicare, or that I am marketing something for personal profit.”

Rogers labelled the letter an “attack on the ideas that I’m putting forward”.

“This has nothing to do with intellectual property and everything to do with the government trying to shut down people who don’t agree with them.”

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Rogers warned of the bad precedent it set, and questioned whether an opponent of WestConnex could register a domain name referring to the controversial road project in Sydney.

In question time, the manager of opposition business, Tony Burke, asked why the government was threatening to sue Rogers and whether it would also sue several Coalition MPs including the health and trade ministers who had used the Medicare logo in their election material.

Malcolm Turnbull replied: “I will see if that litigation is as he has described.”

Labor leader Bill Shorten said the government had hit a “new low ... attacking a grandfather for wanting to save Medicare”.

“Mark Rogers only wants to preserve Medicare for his grandkids and Malcolm Turnbull is calling in his lawyers to try and stop him,” he said.



University of Sydney intellectual property expert, associate professor Kimberlee Weatherall, told Guardian Australia “copyright should not be a tool of censorship and governments and political actors should be really careful about wielding it that way”.

That was because “everyone uses copyright material in the course of political discussion, and it’s probably better to just allow that to happen in the interests of free speech”.

Labor has also used the Medicare logo in its political campaigning for the public health system:

Labor will fight to protect medicare message from MP Joel Fitzgibbon’s Facebook page

Weatherall said the Medicare logo was “as simple as it gets – and the simpler an image is, the less changes, in general, you need to make to avoid infringement”.

She said it “seemed unlikely” that people would have asked the department if there was an association between the website and the health service, because savemedicare.org “looks political to me, which ought to be sufficient disclaimer or differentiation to avoid confusion”.

Weatherall said the use of Medicare in the domain name was pretty safe because it was not used in bad faith, being a political campaign obviously directed at Medicare. “How else do you refer to Medicare, but by the name?” she said.

She said the case illustrated the problems with copyright law, which lacks a specific defence for political comment.

The department warned Rogers to confirm in writing by 18 November that he would take down the material and reserved its right to take legal action if he failed to do so. Rogers asked for an extension of time and is now seeking legal advice.

The department of human services has been contacted for comment.