Posted on 02/10/2009 11:30:42 AM PST by raccoonradio
What do you do if you're a street artist turned marketing phenom who uses other people's images when someone uses one of your designs? If you're Shepard Fairey, apparently, you call your lawyers.
Fairey, of Obama HOPE poster fame, is defending himself against charges he infringed on an Associated Press copyrighted photo in making the poster. He's also been criticized by artists for using others' work without attribution. His lawyers claim in the AP case that he is protected by fair use provisions of the copyright law.
It turns out, however, that the activist art appropriator is a wee bit more sensitive when it is his images that are being "repurposed." An Austin, Texas, artist named Baxter Orr made a parody of Fairey's Andre the Giant design, adorning it with a SARS mask and the title "Protect Yourself."
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
pic of Fairey's "Obey" work with a comment underneath which reads in part:
"he drops a dirty bomb on us. OBAMA
we like him even more...
SHEPARD FAIREY: OBAMAS MINISTER OF PROPAGANDA AGAINST THE PEOPLE
This is mass brainwashing mind control at its finest"
2. It is not exactly the same as the photo, Fairey made Obama look better and with less "liver-lips" and not as much of a frown. And really it is a stylized head portrait, since the background has been removed... I don't think AP has much of a leg to stand on.
So then Fairey shouldn’t complain about the other artist. After all using something like this for parody or
similar purposes is allegedly covered under “FAIR(ey) USE”...
It is kind of interesting...San Francisco media satirists Negativland dabble in taking bits of music, speech, etc.
and making art out of them. It could be Casey Kasem’s
“f-— Snuggles” outtake, bits of a song from “The Little
Mermaid” or Ethel Merman singing “There’s No Business Like
Show Business” (”when you are stealing...stealing...Let’s
go...on, with, the...stealing...” etc.)
A friend of mine ran a ‘pirate radio station’ in Cincinnati in the 1970’s for a time, using a army surplus generator and transmitter rig.
They had a ball broadcasting albums yet to be released to the public, in FULL. The buzz throughout the Cincy region was ‘how did they get that before anyone else?”
Fact was, it was a relative of one of the more famous radio families in Cincinnati, thats how....(chuckle)
Because it was mobile - they hooked the trailer up and went to any place big enough to park without being noticed for a few hours, they never got caught. Drove everybody from Si Leis to the FCC insane for over a year, til his dad figured it out, and made em stop.
Still laugh about it to this day.
.
 |
http://www.art-for-a-change.com/Obey/index.htm
yes in some ways pirates can be entertaining and fun, but when they park right next to the frequency of a legit station—that pays lots of money for licenses and
equipment—and causes them interference, not so funny...
But that is interesting about the connection to the
“radio family”
(Lib) blogger Dan Kennedy on this situation
http://medianation.blogspot.com/2009/02/hypocritical-shepard-fairey.html
The hypocritical Shepard Fairey
As one of my students, Marc Larocque, puts it, “Shepard Fairey is a hypocritical scumbag.” That’s really the only proper reaction you can have upon learning that Fairey, who’s fighting a copyright complaint lodged by the Associated Press, has himself charged an Austin artist with copyright violation for doing exactly the same thing.
The artist, Baxter Orr, took Fairey’s iconic image of Andre the Giant and put a respiratory mask on it — precisely the sort of “transformative” use that Fairey is relying on in his own repurposing of the AP’s Barack Obama photo to make his Obama “Hope” poster. Boston Globe cartoonist Dan Wasserman has all the details.
Fairey is up to his neck in it at the moment, filing a pre-emptive lawsuit against the AP and defending himself against vandalism charges brought by the Boston police. I still think his Obama poster is protected under the fair-use exception, as I wrote last week. But so is Orr’s Andre the Giant image. These are nearly identical cases, and it’s amazing that Fairey doesn’t see it that way.
Update: Gee, Fairey’s problem with Orr couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that Orr seems less enamored of Obama than Fairey does. Could it? (See:
http://www.baxterorr.bigcartel.com/product/dope
I think you are right...
Anyway, there’s still the issue of who to OBEY...
Should be noted acts like Negativland take small samples of a work, rather than the whole work, to make a montage with them.
Here’s their “no Business” song (”let’s go, on with the...
stealing”)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8veXrYh1cc
Shepard Fairey, fraud, sell-out.
He is an anti-corpratist that has a marketing deal with Saks Fifth Avenue. (His followers are crestfallen over this).
My brother-in-law has Fairey’s commie crap hanging in the living room, including a framed “Yes We Did” MoveOn.org portrait of The One.
Exactly, “Imagine no possessions...”? Fairey ain’t giving out his work for free!
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