Is There "Hope" for Shepard Fairey?How does fair-use law work, anyway?
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2009, at 4:47 PM ET
Shepard Fairey may have hoped to teach something new about art and copyright with his iconic "Hope" poster of Barack Obama. Instead, he is accused of lying about which Associated Press photo he used. (He says he made a mistake.) But if Fairey's lying has probably made a hash of his case and lost him a lawyer, it has also raised that pesky question yet again: Just what is fair use? Was it legal for Fairey to take an AP photo and turn it into this piece of artwork?
Copyright lawyers, when asked about fair use, love to emphasize its complexity and opacity. I won't deny that fair use can be a little dense, yet I firmly believe the basics can be well-understood. My project is to demystify: a few details may be lost, but here goes.
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StumbleUponIf you kill someone, you've committed murder, right? Yes—unless he was about to shoot you first, in which case we call it self-defense. Fair use takes that same concept to copyright law. It is all about justification, and this is a key to understanding it. Fair use allows use of a work that would ordinarily constitute infringement, if that use is justified (or excused, if you like) with some compelling reason.
For example? Consider this:
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum.
Those words were written by Joni Mitchell. By putting them here I've made a copy of her work without her permission. This would be illegal—except that fair use doctrine says I can quote short passages. Why let me quote Joni Mitchell? Imagine getting permission every time you quoted anyone or anything. That might be polite, but it would sure make writing—particularly writing reviews—a lot harder. And so the right to quote makes writing easier—and copyright, after all, is supposed to help people to write, not make it harder for them.
Here's a second example:
This is the Economist's use of the infamous Abu Ghraib photos, taken by American military personnel, which TV, newspapers, and magazines repurposed without hesitation. What we have here is fair use in news reporting. The photographs in the Abu Ghraib scandal were the story; what might have otherwise been an infringement of copyright is permitted so that the news can be reported. From this, we understand why fair use bears a close relationship to the freedom of the press. Again, the use is considered "fair" because there is some good reason, or many, for it.
What counts as a "good reason"? In addition to our two examples, take a look at what has been declared fair use by courts or legislatures. They include:
- Quotations of reasonable length
- Parody (but not satire)
- Use in news reporting
- Time-shifting (recording TV for later viewing)
- Thumbnailing (resizing) for image search engines
- Reverse-engineering for a new operating platform (figuring out what you need to do to write a game that works on a Sony Playstation)
- Limited copying for classroom or educational use
What do these things have in common? One answer, borne out by the quotation example, is that fair use aids secondary creativity, or creativity that builds on an original. "The use must be of a character that serves the copyright objective of stimulating productive thought and public instruction," Judge Pierre Leval of the federal appeals court wrote in a famous article. Another popular idea, originally popularized by Boston University law professor Wendy Gordon, is that the list above reflects situations in which bargaining for a license is likely to break down or prove impractical. A third idea, suggested by my Abu Ghraib example, suggests that fair use is a safety valve that prevents copyright from curbing free speech or freedom of the press.
While you can see these ambitions reflected in the list above, no single "goal" seems to explain why we see the fair-use categories we do. For example, what does the right to use your TiVo have to do with creating anything? I think it is more accurate to say that the animating spirit of fair use is that courts may recognize any public-minded justification. The real question is whether the justification is strong enough to justify denying the copyright owner her usual right to demand permission. This is why fair use is sometimes called a safety valve—you can imagine that when the public's interest in infringement is strong enough, an alarm goes off and the copyright system shuts down.
Lawyers and judges might not agree with my description of fair use and might say that it's impossible to "categorize" fair use as I have, but I think that's an overstatement. For precedent, by its nature, creates categories. For example, in 1994, the Supreme Court ruled that a rap parody of "Pretty Woman" was fair use. In that moment, it created a category of fair use, because anything similar enough to that case is governed by it.
For everyday questions, it is the categories of fair use that matter most. They are what industries, in practice, rely on. Publishers and the news media depend daily on the rights to quote and report. The TiVo wouldn't exist in its present form without the time-shifting right, and so on.
The categories I've described may make fair use sound relatively simple, but that would be misleading. Even if you are within a recognized category, you might, for some reason or another, exceed its boundaries. Again, consider self-defense. Wild Bill is one thing, but killing isn't self-defense if you attack someone who threatens you with what is obviously a water pistol. There's a limit to what counts as self-defense, even if it can be hard to say exactly where the line is. Similarly, there are limits to what counts as quotation. Taking the lyrics of an entire song, for example, isn't quotation; it's conversion.
The fair-use categories also don't work in new or uncharted terrain, as when Google and other search engines began their image searches and, in doing so, made millions of thumbnail images. Pornography sites argued that such image searches were infringement. The federal courts in California, coincidentally home to both industries, ruled against them. And that's what gave rise to the category of fair use in thumbnails for search.
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Many people when they look at the AP image and the Fairey image side by side make the mistake of conflating 'similar' with 'the same'. In fact they are two distinctly different images and the ways in which they are different make them different wholly and entirely. The AP image is a photograph taken and used for journalistic purposes. When it used there is an inherent assumption that the visual information included within it will represent the subject as information. The Fairey image is a print reproduction of a painting in which the message has been controlled by the inclusion of text. A specific color scheme has been used to further control the message and the image has been reduced to roughly three or four "planes" of depth in reference to early 20th century propaganda and advertisement styles, which further controls the reading.
Now, I can't say how the law will treat this issue. Nor can I say that Fairey has behaved ethically in his response to the legal case. What I can say is that the implications for judging Fairey's 'Hope' image as a legally punishable case of infringement are truly frightening indeed. I also would not want to see the committee that will have to formed to both go back through every piece of commercial art ever created in this country and decide what constitutes infringement in those cases (& I can't see how deciding against Fairey could not require such action). Nor would I want to be the arbiter of what free speech may or may not be exercised because it comes in the form of art that has been based upon some other document.
-- jgarth
(To reply, click here)
Had he been honest he could have had a very strong case to make that the COMPOSITION was similar but the execution was different. And he could have brought in expert after expert to cite everyone from Picasso to Dali to pretty much every contemporary artist. After all it was Picasso who said:
"Students copy - artists steal."
Another deciding issue here is how the artist acted when his work became popular. Had he just had his initial murals, and then upon being asked to do poster reprints approached AP to do a licensing deal, everything would have gone smoothly - the same way Rap artists pay royalties to those they sample.
Now of course it's a copyright fight. One he would have one had he been honest up front.
-- degsme
(To reply, click here)
When I took copyright law several years ago in law school, I learned that the purpose of copyright is to give the author an economic incentive to create the work. It does so by providing a limited monopoly over the work. As the author of this article says, the whole point of copyright law is to encourage creativity, not stifle it.
The fair use doctrine grows out of this purpose. If I use another's work in my own work in such a way that my work does not become a substitute for the original work--thereby infringing on the original author's monopoly over the market created by his or her work--then my use is fair. For example, if I quote a couple of lines from somebody's book in writing a review of the book, no one is going to view those quotations in my review as a substitute for the book itself and not buy the book. (They may not buy the book if I give it a bad review, but that's another matter entirely.)
The second, closely related fair use concept is whether the use is "transformative," meaning that it takes the original work and turns it into something else entirely. Again, the more "transformative" my work is, the less likely someone is to see it as a substitute for the original.
These concepts are what led the Supreme Court to say that 2 Live Crew's parody of "Pretty Woman" was fair use, despite the fact that it lifts musical and lyrical aspects of the song wholesale. The Court reasoned that no one was going to buy 2 Live Crew's filthy rhyme in place of Roy Orbison's classic--it was not a substitute for the original. Also, the Court found that the dirty lyrics, even if crude, were clearly a way of playing off the wholesomeness of the original--that is, the use was transformative.
If these concepts are applied to Fairey's work, the conclusion that his work is fair use is inescapable. No one would view the campaign poster as a substitute for the news photo. The two have entirely different purposes and different markets. And it is clearly transformative--it turns a run-of-the-mill stock photo into a work of art with powerful political overtones. Whatever stupidity he may have engaged in with respect to misidentifying the photo he used, it doesn't matter--this is obviously fair use.
-- hawkeye1976
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