A judge put his foot down and ended the trial between the Associated Press and Shepard Fairey, the artist who painted 2008’s most famous image. The AP said the dead beat (their words) artist took their photograph and copied it with crayons and pens and things. He said are you crazy, it’s art. They said are you crazy, it looks exactly the same. I don’t think the judge had a choice.

As you can imagine, I had quite a sukkel finding an objective opinion on this one. Being associated and the press, the AP pretty much carpet bombed all my sources. The only credible quote I could find tells us that the AP reckons the case is, “the straightforward question of whether a T-shirt company may use a nearly verbatim copy of a copyrighted image to generate millions in dollars of revenues for itself without securing the permission of the copyright owner”.

The artist had nothing to say.

The other thing we can’t dispute is this.

There is an uncanny similarity. There’s no denying it.

But I say as soon as Shepard Fairey picked up a brush or a pen or whatever and started drawing it, the image became his. Copyright law says something remarkably similar.

Unless, of course, if he just slid the photo under some aftryspapier and traced it. That’s cheating. Everyone knows that.

[SOURCE: ABC News]