Buy Nothing Facebook groups have been operating nationwide for over a decade. Started by two mothers, Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller, as a Facebook page in their small Washington community, the goal was to divert goods from landfills, help low-income families, and strengthen ties between neighbors as people exchanged everything from food to furniture at exactly the same price point: free.
In San Francisco, the Buy Nothing No Rules group has more than 116,000 members who give away their stuff and help each other out. The arrangement has worked well for everyone until last week when Buy Nothing Groups nationwide (including in the Bay Area) were deactivated over a trademark dispute brought on by the Buy Nothing Project, Clark and Rockefeller’s corporation (fine, a benefit corporation), that trademarked the term in 2022. Buy Nothing Project is now attempting to steer the thousands of community-led Buy Nothing groups off of Facebook and onto their proprietary app.
The cease and desist comes at an incredibly bad time: Over the weekend, some 42 million Americans, 112,000 of whom live in San Francisco, were set to lose their federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits due to the record-long government shutdown. In the few hours after Washington announced that SNAP funding would lapse, Buy Nothing groups across the country quickly became digital bulletins for food distribution, a network that had to scramble to figure out how to connect outside and around the Buy Nothing groups that suddenly went dark on Facebook.
“These buy nothing communities, you know, they're kind of a barometer for what's going on in the world and society,” said Liz Cahill, one of the administrators of Buy Nothing No Rules San Francisco. During the pandemic, the group was especially active in supporting the elderly, she said. It’s always a place for families to find children’s Halloween costumes, rehome furniture, offload unneeded supplies, and lend things to neighbors. And food is often shared, be it leftovers from corporate caterers, pantry cleanouts before moving, or mutual aid.
Cahill claims the Buy Nothing Project’s move is illegal, as US trademark law protects the public’s right to use words descriptively and non-commercially under normative fair use.
“Trademark rights under the Lanham Act exist to prevent consumer confusion in commerce, not to control speech or community organizing,” Cahill wrote in a post on Facebook. Everything on the page is completely free; therefore nothing is commercial. The team offered to change the name in compliance with the trademark dispute, so long as they could reactivate the group and retain its members.
Lewis Baden, one of the group’s three admins, mentioned the dire SNAP situation when he contacted the email address who reported the page, provided by Facebook parent company Meta. “I've been involved with a few Buy Nothings for a few years and I think part of the whole thing about it, the ethos of it, is that people are not looking for anything in return,” Baden told me. “This group gave thousands of people hope on a daily basis.”
After a week of contacting the Buy Nothing Project and working with Meta, the citywide group was reinstated under a slightly different name but with the same core mission: Buy Not A Thing No Rules San Francisco.
Activity in the group immediately returned to its normal pace, a sign that the things — and the needs — were still there. On Friday, baby formula, diapers, cabbage, carpets, drywall supplies, treadmills, snowboarding boots, and more were offered in the group. Many posts expressed excitement that the page had been resuscitated and could continue to operate at its original cost: nothing.
