What Obama Taught Us About Fair Use

OK, not Obama exactly. Although, as a Constitutional law professor, I imagine he would have something to say on the legal issues.

Artist Shepard Fairey admitted using an AP photograph as the basis for his iconic red, white, and blue image of Obama, seen everywhere during the election campaign... and ever since. However, he argued that his alteration of the original photo added additional commentary and creativity to the original work, and that his rights to do so are protected.

This has launched one of the most lively and high profile discussions of the subject of "fair use" in a long time. Fair use is a term that applies to the conditions under which one can use someone else's copyrighted work without having that use constitute an infringement of copyright.

A good analysis of fair use arguments for one and all can be found in a recent article from SLATE Magazine (link, below). Actually, I like this analysis, made in one of the comments to the SLATE article, by "hawkeye1976":

"When I took copyright law several years ago in law school, I learned that the purpose of copyright is to give the author an economic incentive to create the work. It does so by providing a limited monopoly over the work. As the author of this article says, the whole point of copyright law is to encourage creativity, not stifle it.

"The fair use doctrine grows out of this purpose. If I use another's work in my own work in such a way that my work does not become a substitute for the original work--thereby infringing on the original author's monopoly over the market created by his or her work--then my use is fair. For example, if I quote a couple of lines from somebody's book in writing a review of the book, no one is going to view those quotations in my review as a substitute for the book itself and not buy the book. (They may not buy the book if I give it a bad review, but that's another matter entirely.)

"The second, closely related fair use concept is whether the use is 'transformative,' meaning that it takes the original work and turns it into something else entirely. Again, the more transformative my work is, the less likely someone is to see it as a substitute for the original.

"These concepts are what led the Supreme Court to say that 2 Live Crew's parody of 'Pretty Woman' was fair use, despite the fact that it lifts musical and lyrical aspects of the song wholesale. The Court reasoned that no one was going to buy 2 Live Crew's filthy rhyme in place of Roy Orbison's classic--it was not a substitute for the original. Also, the Court found that the dirty lyrics, even if crude, were clearly a way of playing off the wholesomeness of the original--that is, the use was transformative.

"If these concepts are applied to Fairey's work, the conclusion that his work is fair use is inescapable. No one would view the campaign poster as a substitute for the news photo. The two have entirely different purposes and different markets. And it is clearly transformative--it turns a run-of-the-mill stock photo into a work of art with powerful political overtones. Whatever stupidity he may have engaged in with respect to misidentifying the photo he used, it doesn't matter--this is obviously fair use."

I think hawkeye nails it! Hawkeye indeed! Read the full story, here:

"Is There Hope for Shepard Fairey? How does fair-use law work, anyway?"

Photos, Photos, Photos!

A recent article about Getty and Corbis, two of the big photo licensing agencies, and their aggressive policing of rights violators on the web, from the LA Times, Sept. 13, 2009:

The letter arrived at Dave Formella's Long Beach travel agency the other day. It's fair to say it freaked him out.

"It has come to our attention that you are using an image represented by Getty Images for online promotional purposes," the letter from the photo service began. It demanded $1,000 in damages, or $900 if Formella agreed to pony up the cash within two weeks.

"We were really surprised, because we didn't think we were using any copyrighted pictures," Formella, 51, told me. He said he immediately pulled every photo from his company's site, which had been put together by a Web-design firm.

But Formella said he won't pay hundreds of dollars for inadvertently using the photo -- a generic shot of a woman sitting in front of a computer. Getty charges as little as $49 to license such images.

"A thousand dollars in damages?" Formella said incredulously. "Are they kidding?"

That's undoubtedly a common reaction among the tens of thousands of people who receive such letters each year from Getty and another leading image provider, Corbis, owned by Bill Gates.

I have licensed images from both collections. They are a bit on the pricey side, although sometimes they've got a photo you're not going to find anywhere else. Case in point, I needed a picture of Anthony Sabato, Jr. from his Calvin Klein underwear modeling days for an appearance he made on the Tyra Banks show.

I had to license the Sabato photo from the agency which had the photo rights.

For generic celebrity publicity photos, I generally like Everett Collections. For stock photography, I have used Shutterstock, a subscription service (if you're going to be downloading a lot of stock photos, as we did on the Tyra show) and Istockphoto.com, which has some beautiful photography at very reasonable prices per image, which is where I got the art photo for the home page of my Rights Camera Action! website.