In the last few weeks we've written a lot about the Painted Rooms project at San Francisco's boutique hotel, Hotel Des Arts that was put together by StartSOMA. To date almost 30 rooms have been hand painted by some of the best emerging artists in the world. David Choe, Logan Hicks, Maya Hayuk, Eric Orr, Sam Flores... have all painted amazing rooms at the hotel. It's a project that we think is fantastic, as it gives artists a terrific platform for their work.

Well it seems that Louis Vuitton is not as much of a fan of Painted Rooms as we are. The company's "ANTICOUNTERFEITING DIRECTOR OF THE AMERICAS" has just served the hotel with a cease and desist letter telling them that the series of hand painted floor-to-ceiling murals by San Francisco pop artist Tim Gaskin violates their LV trademark because the artist incorporates the LV logo into his artwork.

LV demands that the hotel .... "remove all infringing depictions of the LV trademark from your walls". The letter further requests the "name and address" of the person who created "each mural painted", and threatened legal action for "trademark infringement, false designation of origin, unfair competition, and trademark dilution".

While we're not lawyers, and legally we have no idea who's right, we're incredibly impressed that the Hotel des Arts is fighting for the artist in this case and is not simply painting over the walls the day they got the letter which is what most people would do when faced with legal action for a company like LV.

Hotel des Arts' Richard Singer said in a statement that we just read - "Removing the LV trademark from the walls of the hotel would necessitate destroying an original piece of fine art, and that is NOT something we are even going to consider," "Works of artistic expression are clearly protected by the First Amendment, and we absolutely refuse to be censored by a multinational corporation and their teams of lawyers".

Good stuff. We'll be interested to see how this plays out. If you have any thoughts on this one, drop us a note.