

Shepard Fairey Pleads Guilty Over Obama ‘Hope’ Image - cwan
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/shepard-fairey-pleads-guilty-over-obama-hope-image/

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bradleyland
The article does a poor job of explaining _specifically why_ he may see jail
time. Misuse of a copyrighted image in itself is rarely cause for imprisonment
(at least today).

Fairey is in hot water _not_ because of the copyright issue, but because of
the falsified evidence he provided as part of his lawsuit against the AP. So
everyone understands the series of events, Fairey saw the heat coming and
filed suit against the AP pre-emptively. In that suit, it is now clear that he
did broke some laws completely unrelated to the copyright infringement. This
statement is based on the quote (from this article): "...later admitted that
he had been mistaken and had tried to conceal his mistake, by destroying
documents and fabricating others."

So, Fairey, like others before him, will not suffer the greatest penalty from
his canonical crimes, but for his subsequent actions attempting to avoid the
consequences and lying to the courts.

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gee_totes
Shepard Fairey needs to find himself a new legal team. If his current legal
team could make a good 'fair use' defense for the Obama image, then Fairey
probably wouldn't feel the urge to destroy evidence in order to win his case.

Meanwhile, his legal team was out issuing 'cease-and-desist' letters over the
Obey Steelers baby dolls. <http://gawker.com/5166157/obey-trademark-law>

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samstave
I don't think that photographs of publicly elected officials should be
copyright-able in this context: it should be fair use.

