Here is a really interesting copyright case – which has impacks for music.
The street artist Shepard Fairey and The Associated Press have settled their long-running legal battle over the well-known “Hope” campaign poster of Barack Obama.
…Mr. Fairey, who sued The Associated Press in 2009 as it began to accuse him of copyright infringement for using one of its photographs as the basis for the poster, said that he did not appropriate any copyrightable material and that his use of the photograph, which showed Mr. Obama looking up pensively, constituted fair use under copyright law.
…Because of the issues at stake and the high visibility of the parties involved, the case had shined a spotlight on the tricky legal issues surrounding the fair-use exceptions to copyright protections. One of the central questions was whether Mr. Fairey’s creation, which became ubiquitous on street corners and T-shirts during and after Mr. Obama’s campaign, constituted a “transformative” use of the photograph, a use that is allowed under the law so that creative expression is not stifled. (via NYT)
To read the rest of this blog – click on the link below.
via Shepard Fairey Settles Copyright & Fair Use Of Obama Image : The New Rockstar Philosophy.
You may also be interested on how the image has been used in other ways. Look at the 13th slide of the presentation below I done a while ago on Zappa and Politics. The ‘Perfectly Clear’ phrase comes from President Nixon in the 1970′s!!
