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Thursday, February 12, 2009

Fairey use?


www.vjculture.com
Interesting article about Shepard Fairey and the use of copyrighted material. Shepard took the preemptive suit against AP on the photo used for Barak's Hope design. The Judge sided with Fairey that the image was transformed into an abstract piece.
What does this mean for artist re-purposing material? It's a gray area and will become more gray under the Orphan Works bill (Or, maybe not)
Those who will suffer most from this bill are the artists whose work is professional quality but are not tied to a corporate entity.
By default an artist's work is no longer copyrighted. The artist has to register each piece or it could get registered by someone else.
Which leads me back to Shepard Fairey. Has anyone heard of Mannie Garcia?
He's the photographer that took the picture.

1 comment:

Barry McNamara said...

This is a very interesting developement. Does this imply a recording artist who samples the work of another recording artist can take a pre-emptive case against the copyright holder of the original recording? If so, it could have huge implications.