I do not wholly agree with your position on pinatas, as again I do not see them as an inherent problem, and to some extent I do agree that I might not let a small child get old school on a pinata with a baseball bat, but at a certain point, consenting adults should be able to break whatever is within their right to do so without social odium.

For example, regarding “College Sex and Drug Piñata Parties,” I think we should remember that many of these students are of age to make their own decisions (and, alas, their own mistakes). While I do not condone the use of controlled substances, we should remember that condoms are useful for hygienic reasons and for preventing unwanted pregnancies. Sex toys also promote a healthy relationship to one’s body and sexuality. If a campus group for promoting safe sex were to use pinatas to further awareness among students about contraception, then I applaud such efforts. Standing ovation.

But, as for the task at hand — use of cultural symbols and imagery is not so simple. Although it is a team of people and a company which might create and distribute a popular character, and certainly receive the lion’s share of the rewards that come from that, I would argue that our cultural icons are not simply the property of one corporate entity. There should be some extent to which society is able to claim ownership of these characters, a principle already present in the law in the concept of “fair use.” Whatever the letter of the law, I think it’s a bit unfair for a major corporation to go shut down a strip of small retailers for using its characters.

The real relationship here, the one being interrupted, is between the customer, the parents of children who want to obliterate effigies of Mickey Mouse, and the merchant, the pinata makers. I say this is a real relationship because it is an exchange in the most basic sense of a person’s labor for payment, at also a social arrangement of exchanging one’s work and creativity (pinata making) with another person who appreciates that work (by destroying it with a baseball bat). To supplant that relationship with the relation between the copyright holder and the small business person, who in any calculation is withholding an immensely small margin of the profits being accrued, is to supplant a real relationship with an un-real one. Intellectual property rights should be used to protect the artisan, not stomp them out of existence by companies with extraordinary influence and ownership over culture.

But it really has nothing to do with pinatas, more about copyright infringement