Oops! I guess I owe some money to the city....

Insult to injury, the contact info link on the site doesn't work. They must be monitoring Jack 24/7.

They get you coming and going--use your taxes to rehab the sign, then make you pay to sell a photo of it. Out of curiosity, can they charge people to sell a photo of the Portland building? The Portlandia statue? Where's the authority to profit from this?

I think Kaskey did reserve the rights to Portlandia for commercial use, which is probably why you never saw cheap paperweights or postcards of her.

Ridiculous- I don't think there is a charge for the Statue of Liberty being used in photos etc....silly City of Portland ....it isn't even weird ...it's just silly.

What would the Admiral think if he were still around?

The Admiral would like to add to his retirement
and charge for every picture people take of him!

On second thought, who would want one?

I know there's some sort of arrangement re. Portlandia but this is a strangely American thing. Anyone who has visited Rome or Paris knows that you don't have to go far to find all sorts of gimcrackery re. miniature Eiffel Towers, Vatican City memorabilia, pictures of the Pope, etc.

And, just out of curiosity, what are they doing - if anything - with the folks who do "take-offs" on the Made in Oregon sign by duplicating it and substituting other information? Seen a lot of those about . . .

It's classic City of Portland -- money-grubbing and clueless.

Can Portland sell the naming rights to the "Made in Oregon" sign?

I think "Made in Oregon" belongs to one of the branches of the Naito family, who owned the stores.

Reminds me of a story a client related to me some years back. She was a student intern with the city. She was involved with some citizen committee whose task was to explore creative revenue sources for the city. Boy Wonder Eric Sten showed up at a meeting bubbling with enthusiasm over his wonderful revenue enhancement idea. It seems his proposal was for the city to copyright the phrase "Portland, Oregon." His reasoning was that any business using "Portland, Oregon," for example in its letterhead, product labels, and so forth, would have to pay the city a royalty for the use of the phrase. She assured me he was quite serious. I believed her.

He can't just throw in a charge now. It's legal to take a photo from public property. There are many of them at Sat.Mkt. A lot of photos are of private businesses where the photo is taken from the sidewalk.

Kasky negotiated a special deal and not sure he even covered his costs. People aren't interested anymore in that subject. The photo could still be taken but only if it was a larger one that included Portlandia but didn't focus on it. Apparently the Admiral likes to be legally challenged and so tries to assert what he wants in case, people don't question it. The law doesn't seem to impress him much for all his claims.

It's time to OCCUPY PORTLAND (The Sign)

Thousands of photographers converge on Waterfront Park, taking over the Saturday Market (the bastion of free-market capitalism), along with the Burnside Bridge shutting it down and preventing it from lifting for the one or two boats a day. Take THOUSANDS, yes thousands of photographs of the sign. Then flood the Internet with pictures of this sign. Of course using commercial websites that have a banner ad, so that there is "commercial use". And of course take advantage of foreign-owned websites and web servers too...

Just watch the City try to demand payment from some little podunk Internet company in Romania, or somewhere in China, or North Korea...