Week 6 - I HOPE you like this entry

I remember the first time I saw Fairey's image. I was 19, about to drop out of college and completely disenchanted with everything about the world around me. The posters were being given away by something like a 'Students for Obama' group that swarmed the campus that fall semester. What drew me to it, first, were the colors. Something about the tinted red white and blue against the faded white background. I got back to the apartment I was living in and hung it up next to my bed. The corny part of the story, is that after seeing that image every day and absorbing the election buzz kind of through osmosis, I think I actually found a sliver hope in everything that was going on in my world. It got to be that I associated Fairey's image with the thought that maybe my future wasn't going to be the shit-pile that I thought it would. At that point, I didn't need the poster by me bed anymore. It had given birth to an outlook I carried with me until the night of the election.

Then the next six years happened. Not quite as hopeful as I would have liked, but hell, I'm doing ok. I think that there are a lot of people that share a similar experience to what I had with the colorful picture of Mr. Obama. That Fairey's rendition of Garcia's original image generated more emotion than it did currency is one aspect of this argument that makes it so legally messy. If Fairey's intention was to make as much money off of HOPE as possible, then the legal battle wouldn't have gone on for as long as it did. The Associated Press probably saw how much they could have made, had the idea been theirs, and proceeded on the war path. They were broke in 2009--selling off assets to keep their heads above water and still posting profits way lower than the year before.

All of this lawyer talk makes my head hurt. What do I think? Yes, fair use applies to Fairey's Obama poster. It looks different enough than the original. Fairey doesn't have a private jet full of money because of it. The AP's original wasn't doing much before Fairey sampled it, so no potential market loss there. Most importantly, as was the case with me, it "stimulate(d) creativity for the enrichment of the general public." (I can't quite find where Wikipedia pulled those words from, but they illustrate my point wonderfully)

If you want my opinion, money brings out the absolute worst in humanity, and The Associated Press is no exception. I may take a hit this week for not dissecting the legality of Fairey's case into as many pieces as I should have, but the degree to which my head won't be spinning by the time I go to sleep tonight will be worth it.

Oh, and here is a testament to Shepard Fairey's artistic abilities. I tried Obama-izing an attribution-liscenced pic of our Head Cheese, and it came out looking awful. By the looks of what came up in the Creative Commons image search I did, Fairey probably could have found a workable CC picture of Mr Obama. We don't choose when inspiration strikes, though, and have to work with what's available in the moment. I would imagine that he'll stop to think before he pulls another picture from the internet, though.    

This image is a derivative of "Obama Speaking (15)" by borman818, used under CC BY. "TIRED" is licensed under CC BY by Dan Smith.