Re: The AP sucks shit: Copyright insanity

mpalmer@xxxxxxxxx (Michael Palmer) wrote in
news:4adfed86.885584234@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

in this case the "changes" were deemed not significant enough to
trigger the fair use defense.

Er, what?

Has a decision been handed down and I missed it? And Google and the
NY Times, too?

Fair use in different areas follows very different rules.

If as a musician I want to make an edition of a piece of public
domain music, and my only source is someone else's edition of the
piece, all I have to do to not infringe the other editions copyright
is to make sufficient changes and additions in my edition that make
it distinct from the other edition.

Of course, in different countries, the rules for this are different
and complicated, but the principle is the same -- you can transform
a derivative work into one worthy of its own copyright by making
sufficient changes to it.

I think Fairey's work, even if he did or did not use Photoshop to
produce it, is sufficiently different in important ways from the
source photo to be a new work, and to not infringe the source
photograph's copyright. When I look at them side by side, I can see
that the basic outlines are very close (though certainly not
identical, which would tend to refute the Photoshop argument), but
coloration changes that Fairey makes (it's not simple Warholization,
as a matter of fact) have a large effect on the emotional impact of
the image. Of particular importance to me is his decision to remove
the flag from the background, even though it would have fit his
color scheme. Also, his cropping and the addition of the words
changes it significantly.

I just can't see how this is not fair use.

If it's not, a whole lot of artists are in *big* trouble.

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/
.