Artist Shepard Fairey filed a lawsuit last Monday against The Associated Press, claiming it had infringed on his copyright claims. The news photograph he is referring to is one we all know well--the hope campaign poster image of President Obama (shown below).
"Mr. Fairey decided to create the image on his own before contacting the Obama campaign, which welcomed it but never officially adopted it because of copyright concerns. Before the election, Mr. Fairey was best known for his fake-advertising stickers and posters, pasted in cities across the country, showing an ominous, abstracted image of the wrestler Andre the Giant along with the word “Obey.” " -New York Times Article regarding the issue
The law behind design is pretty interesting--people put their work up on the internet all the time, and anyone can take it and call it there own as long as no one else knows about it (illegally, of course). I once heard that if you edit a design by 15% in can be called your own. But that makes me wonder: What defines 15%? Who defines it? The principle is simple but the issue is complicated. It will be interesting to see who prevails in this case.
2 comments:
This is really interesting especially because the artist was probably working from photographs when he designed the Hope poster. Therefore, if it was legal for him to take a photograph to a illustration (what he believed to be an alteration of 15%), then it should be kosher for the AP to take his illustration to a photograph. It just seems a little hypocritical to me because a basic photograph, even artistically taken, is most definitely 15% different from an illustration of Obama in the same position. Photography is a completely different medium!
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