NEW YORK — On buttons, posters and websites, the image was everywhere during the presidential campaign: a pensive Barack Obama looking upward, as if to the future, splashed in red, white and blue and underlined with the caption HOPE.
Designed by Shepard Fairey, a Los Angeles-based street artist, the image led to sales of hundreds of thousands of posters and stickers and is so much in demand that copies signed by Fairey have sold for thousands of dollars on eBay.
The image, Fairey has acknowledged, is based on an Associated Press photo taken in April 2006 by Mannie Garcia. The AP says it owns the copyright and wants credit and compensation. Fairey disagrees.
“The Associated Press has determined that the photograph used in the poster is an AP photo and that its use required permission,” the AP’s director of media relations, Paul Colford, said in a statement.
“We believe fair use protects Shepard’s right to do what he did here,” says Fairey’s lawyer, Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University and a lecturer at the Stanford Law School.
