Week 6 Blog (late)

The question is:

Blogging this week continues on copyright law. This is an ongoing issue which will continue to be an important current issue for web and technical artists. The story this week is the Obama poster created by street artist Shepard Fairey. Fairey used an AP photo for the basic image of Obama. AP says it is copyright infringement, Fairey says he changed it enough for "fair use" to apply.

Do some research, what do others think. Blog this week on what you think about this issue. Is there a way Creative Commons could have been used here and saved a whole lot of pain and lawyers' fees? Comment on at least one classmate's post, tell me whose in your check-in...

While it is possible to see both sides of this issue, I definitely think that it could have been resolved by the use of Creative Commons, which promotes sharing and encourages collaboration of artist's works. Even though it is obvious that Shepard Fairey used the AP photo of Obama to create his famous poster, fair use does allow exceptions to the copyright law, including the exception based on how the original was affected by the new product. I don't think that Fairey's poster did anything to adversely affect the original photo, but at the same time, since AP did have a copyright on the photo, Fairey should have at least credited them for it.