Van de Kamp Ad Against Feinstein Will Be Changed : Governor’s race: Newspaper threatens to sue him over alleged trademark infringement.

Under threat of a lawsuit, Democratic gubernatorial candidate John K. Van de Kamp has agreed to alter a negative commercial he is running about Dianne Feinstein because it uses the registered trademark of the San Francisco Chronicle while attacking Feinstein’s record as mayor.

“That is our trademark,” Ron Ingram, general counsel of the Chronicle Publishing Co., said Saturday, “and we wanted it out of that advertisement because we do not feel we can let people capriciously use our trademark for their own purposes.”

In a development highly unusual for a statewide campaign, the Washington consulting firm of Doak, Shrum and Associates, producers of the ad, shipped out new versions of the Van de Kamp commercial without the newspaper’s name.

Ingram said he was under the impression that the ad his company objects to would be off the air by Sunday at the latest. But television programming procedures make it difficult to substitute ads on weekends, so the controversial ad will probably run until Monday at noon on stations around California.

Informed of this, Ingram said, “If it is not off by Monday we will seek a cease-and-desist order to remove it.”

The ad in question uses newspaper articles to support its charges about Feinstein’s stewardship of San Francisco. The newspaper’s trademark, or front page nameplate, “San Francisco Chronicle,” appears in four frames of the 30-second commercial.

A small photograph of Van de Kamp appears at the bottom of the last frame of the commercial along with a notice that the ad is paid for by his campaign.

“In our judgment, one of your advertisements violates trademark and related rights of (The Chronicle) by falsely designating the origin of the advertisement and by implying that the Chronicle Publishing Co. supports or endorses you, your advertisement, that style of advertisement, or your comments regarding Dianne Feinstein,” Neil Shapiro, an attorney for the Chronicle, wrote Van de Kamp.

Feinstein, Van de Kamp’s opponent in the June 5 Democratic primary, recently soared past Van de Kamp in the Los Angeles Times Poll. She did that largely because of a television ad she ran in February that described her mayoral years in positive terms.

Van de Kamp has said that he felt compelled to run his negative commercial to point out things in Feinstein’s record that she had left out. These range from his allegation that “she was cited for dumping a billion gallons of sewage” into San Francisco Bay to her responsibility for a projected $180-million deficit in the first budget of her successor, Mayor Art Agnos.

A Times analysis of the Van de Kamp ad found that some of the charges were debatable, however. For example, Feinstein inherited an antiquated sewage system and then proceeded to build a new system.

Ingram said Chronicle officials saw The Times’ analysis, which was accompanied by a photograph taken from the Van de Kamp ad. The Chronicle trademark was in the photograph.

“When we communicated (concern) to the Van de Kamp campaign they at first said they would not take it out,” Ingram continued. “So we told them we would seek a temporary restraining order to stop them. At that point, about 2 o’clock Friday, they agreed to do it and said they would have the new ad in the stations on Saturday.”

A random check of California TV stations on Saturday, including those in Los Angeles, found that the Van de Kamp ad with the Chronicle trademark was still being aired.

Los Angeles lawyer Mickey Kantor, who handled the negotiations for Van de Kamp, said: “We explained to the Chronicle that we would have the new ad in the stations by Saturday with instructions to substitute it for the other ad. But we told the Chronicle that it was up to the stations, not us, to make the change.”

Efforts to reach television executives were unsuccessful. But the standard procedure for running television advertisements on a weekend makes it very difficult to substitute a new ad after noon on Friday, three industry experts said.

For one thing, most big stations have computerized programming operations “that make weekend changes almost impossible after noon” in the words of a Sacramento consultant not involved in the governor’s race and who asked not to be identified.

Stan Kay, a buyer of television time in Los Angeles also not connected with the gubernatorial campaigns, said Saturday, “The stations have to take special steps to remove an ad from the air on a weekend” because few engineers and executives with the authority to make the changes work on weekends.