the poster was based on an Associated Press photograph by freelance photographer Mannie Garcia.
Fairey is being represented by Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University. Falzone is quoted in the press release, "We believe fair use protects Shepard's right to do what he did here."[
Photographer Mannie Garcia contended that he retained copyright to the photo according to his AP contract. He said that he was "so proud of the photograph and that Fairey did what he did artistically with it, and the effect it’s had," but that he did not "condone people taking things, just because they can, off the Internet."
The AP and Shepard Fairey settled out of court in January 2011.
AP and Fairey "agreed to work together going forward with the Hope image and share the rights to make the posters and merchandise bearing the Hope image and to collaborate on a series of images that Fairey will create based on AP photographs.
In a separate criminal action Federal prosecutors have requested prison time and a fine of $3.2 million for Fairey with the government sentencing request stating that “A sentence without any term of imprisonment sends a terrible message to those who might commit the same sort of criminal conduct. Encouraging parties to game the civil litigation system…creates terrible incentives and subverts the truth-finding function of civil litigation.”
After I stumbled upon the iconic Obama "Hope" poster, I remembered that back in 2009, artist Shepard Fairey was being sued by the owner of the original photograph (AP). Back then I was not very interested in copyright issues, so I never checked what happened with this case. It's interesting and kind of fair that AP and Shepard settled on working together, sharing the rights, and collaborating on other images+photographs. Even though Shepard transformed a "stolen" photograph, his "theft" actually put the original photo on the map. I consider it to be a fair solution for a fair use case.
Even though it does say that it's a "copyrighted material," almost all contents of the "Pop Song Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution since 1929" are accessible through Amazon's "look inside" (which is made possible by a publisher/owner). What does this sharing depend on? Why do some publishers allow people to read the book without buying it? (When you read a book in a library, at least one several copies are purchased). I wonder if it's because this book is published by The University of Chicago as opposed to some Penguin Publishing...