February 5, 2009

Copyright Smackdown: AP Goes After Shepard Fairey

Image created with a little help from <a href="http://obamiconme.pastemagazine.com/">Obamicon.me</a>. Copyright symbol from <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e1/Copyright-serif.svg/354px-Copyright-serif.svg.png">Wikimedia</a>

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Via the Associated Press, we learn that the Associated Press is coming after Shepard Fairey for using one of its photos as the basis of his (everyone say it with me!) iconic Obama “Hope” poster. A few weeks ago, a diligent photographer finally ID’d the poster’s source image as a shot taken in 2006 by an AP freelancer. The AP is now crying copyright infringement and says it has “reached out to Mr. Fairey’s attorney.” (It’s worth noting that when Reuters briefly thought the shot was theirs, they simply asked for credit.) So was Fairey’s unattributed appropriation of the image fair
use? That depends in part on whether the Hope poster was derivative or
transformative (and not just in the political sense). On the derivative
side, even though Fairey’s a design whiz, what he did to the AP image
was not all that tricky. (Photoshop/Illustrator geeks can get the
lowdown here.)
On the transformative side, he altered the original enough that it took
a year to figure out where it came from (though Fairey might have
bothered to note his source in the first place).

Also, Fairey claims he didn’t make any money off the posters, which
were sold to raise money for Obama. And it doesn’t hurt that Fairey’s
lawyer is Anthony Falzone, the head of Stanford’s Fair Use Project and
a colleague of free-culture guru Lawrence Lessig. It looks like the AP is hoping against hope. Maybe it will settle for an autographed poster, now going for as much as $12K on Ebay.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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