Green: Lawsuits ploy for attention

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a lawsuit! In the left corner, we have Shepard Fairey, renegade… Ladies and gentlemen, we have a lawsuit! In the left corner, we have Shepard Fairey, renegade graphic designer and renowned artist of the ubiquitous Barack Obama ‘Hope’ poster. Wielding a long history of legal battles and a charming command of insulting rhetoric, Fairey is a fierce competitor to any foe. And, according to the Boston Globe, at the tender age of 38, Fairey’s already got 15 arrests under his oversized belt, giving him some legitimate street cred. In the right corner, we have the Associated Press. With a massive 4000 employees, including a hefty legal team ‘mdash; which is otherwise locked in the corporation headquarters’ basement and fed scraps of bread and cigar butts, for good measure. This bloated bureaucracy is looking to cut b*tches up. The feud began when the AP issued a statement that Fairey’s poster was a derivative work of a photograph taken by AP photographer Mannie Garcia. Fairey argues that his poster is protected under fair use, an exception to copyright law determined by how much of the original work is used, how it’s been transformed ‘mdash; if it’s different enough to be considered ‘new’ work ‘mdash; and how this new work affects the original, specifically in a commercial sense. And Fairey has a point. While physically, one might argue that Fairey simple tilted the original photograph, which he openly admits to using, colored it and added a ‘Hope’ to its base, in concept the two works are quite different. The AP photograph is, in its purest form, objective journalism. Fairey’s poster is a political statement. Not to mention, Fairey supposedly didn’t make any money off the poster ‘mdash; though the fame certainly didn’t hurt him. So while the AP’s case isn’t hopeless ‘mdash; the original photograph is indeed a creative work that lent itself nicely to Fairey’s purposes ‘mdash; I’m left wondering why it’s choosing now, a year after the poster originally surfaced, to file charges that it might not even win. According to a Bloomberg report, the AP reported that it only recently discovered the infringement after it ‘used ‘special technology’ to determine the image’s original source.’ First of all, I don’t want to even start guessing what this supposed ‘special technology’ is, because there is a significant chance this shadowy, it-that-must-not-be-named tool was probably just the Internet ‘mdash; that is to say, it was a pretty well known fact that the poster was based on an AP photo, as Fairey openly admitted to it on his blog. Second, what does the AP hope to gain by claiming the copyright to this poster? Will it sell it to other newspapers as part of its wire service? The AP’s clients ‘mdash; newspapers ‘mdash; are usually going to run a photograph before a stock image. It’s therefore extremely unlikely that the AP would have gained, or will gain in the future, from owning the copyright. So, I have to wonder: Is this the final, desperate cry of a dying industry. People don’t want to read newspapers anymore? Tired of getting out-scooped by blogs? Well then,’ the AP will just make its own news. You heard it here first, folks. Hot off the presses. The AP is getting ripped off, and it’s not gonna take it anymore! Yet somehow, the entire stunt managed to backfire in the AP’s face. Fairey, the spitfire that he is, has countered the AP with his own lawsuit. According to an Associated Press report, the lawsuit declares that Fairey did not violate the copyright of the photograph. The relevance of such a lawsuit is questionable. As evidence, Fairey’s lawyer offered these words: He transformed a picture into a ‘stunning, abstracted and idealized visual image that creates powerful new meaning and conveys a radically different message.’ The relevance of these words, is even more questionable. Which brings me to the next sad fact of this whole debacle: Fairey is loving every minute of this. Because if people didn’t know he was the man behind the maybe-copyrighted-poster mask, they do now. And the AP is still slowly fading into irrelevance. Molly recommends reading this column while listening to ‘Eye of the Tiger.’ E-mail her at mog4@pitt.edu.