"Hope" – The Legal Battle!

An interesting kerfuffle recently erupted when the Associated Press accused Shepard Fairey, the artist who designed the famous Barack Obama Hope graphic, of copyright infringement and threatened to sue him.

Glen E. Friedman — the super-talented chronicler of my cultural youth — comes up with, sorry to say, an argument in defense of friend Fairey that makes little sense. According to Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing, Friedman’s point can be boiled down like this: The Obama picture sucked originally and was improved. And because Fairey donated every penny he made from the graphic to the Obama campaign, he saw no profit on the graphic and should not be liable.

I’m not a lawyer, so I am certain there are complex legal implications regarding the fair use of this type of picture. Nor do not I understand why the AP would waste its time trying to punish Fairey. The artist has now hired Anthony Falzone, the executive director of the Fair Use Project, a group, that according to Danielle Sacks at Fast Company, “encourages creators to modify copyright terms in order to “increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in “the commons” — the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing.”

But how can anyone argue that Fairey did not profit? To begin with, through this iconographical work, his professional reputation, and thus his future financial rewards, have unquestionably skyrocketed. Without the Associated Press shot there is no icon. Yes, it wasn’t happenstance that he used this picture, but it worked. And unless Fairey took his own shot of Obama, someone was going to lose their work.

In addition, Fairey chose to help Obama get elected — which is a profit of political self-interest.

To put it another way, imagine if a George Bush supporter had taken Friedman’s work without permission and created a graphic for Republican political gain and then donated his earnings to the campaign? Would Friedman then contend that the person made no profit from the picture and it was OK to utilize it without permission?

Now, I will admit that — to me at least — Friedman’s work has far more artistic merit than a run-of-the-mill shot of the president. But, I’m also certain, that his work might seem ordinary to a Republican housewife in Atlanta. Friedman, I will guess, believes that the worth of art can be subjective, as well.

And here I thought era of Obama had made small-minded and selfish ideas like profit a thing of the past.