The issue is whether it’s the letter or intent of the law that matters:

Chase Manhattan Bank recently began branding city sidewalks with its octagonal logo, making perhaps the most distinctive mark yet in this form of guerrilla marketing.

Now, Chase is neither the first nor the only company to use graphic projectors to beam commercial messages onto public sidewalks at night, where pedestrians simply cannot help seeing them. Commerce Bank is another. But the Chase logo is so bold, its branches so numerous and its corporate profile so high that it may set an irresistible example.

Are you beginning to imagine the sidewalks of New York paved from curb to curb after dark in a luminous blanket of logos?

Section 19-138 of the city’s Administrative Code is standing in the way.

“It shall be unlawful,” it says, “for any person to deface any street by painting, printing or writing thereon, or attaching thereto, in any manner, any advertisement or other printed matter.”

That goes for advertising being beamed onto the sidewalks, the Department of Transportation said yesterday.

By its own count, Chase installed graphic projectors inside about two dozen branches in the city as part of an overall refurbishing effort. “We’re trying to create a brighter, friendlier feel to our branches,” said Thomas A. Kelly, a spokesman for the bank. Projectors were installed where foot traffic and neighborhood context warranted them, he said.

“We see kids jumping in and out of the octagon,” Mr. Kelly said. “It’s a fun thing. . . .”

And although Chase has promised to turn off the lights, or signs, or whatever they are, the problem is that they kind of work:

After stepping through a Chase logo the other night, Amber Harris, a graphic designer and an Upper West Sider, said, “I think we’ve run out of places to brand.”

On the other hand, she allowed, if she were a Chase customer looking for a branch in an unfamiliar neighborhood, “I’d be pretty happy to see this.” She likened the phenomenon to the Batman signal.

Then there’s the graffiti moral equivalence:

The Municipal Art Society takes a dimmer view of signs created by “corporate vandals who seem to view sidewalks as nothing more than canvas for their own style of graffiti,” said Vanessa Gruen, the organization’s director of special projects.

“That the latest version of sidewalk defacement is projected rather than physically attached does not differentiate it from stickers, paint, etched names or any other age-old form of sidewalk graffiti,” she said. “All are a visual blight.”