If you read Flickr Censors Political Image Critical of President Obama by Thomas Hawk, you’ll see an interesting discussion centered around a Photoshop’d photograph of President Obama and Flickr’s decision to remove the image. Firas Alkhateeb, a 20-year-old college student in Illinois, is responsible for the image: he started with a cover photograph of Obama from Time magazine and used Photoshop to render Obama’s face as the Joker from Batman: The Dark Knight.
In a Los Angeles Times article, Mr Alkhateeb uploaded the image to his Flickr account on January 18.
Over the next two months, he amassed just a couple thousand hits, he said.
Then the counter exploded after a still-anonymous rogue famously found his image, digitally removed the references to Time Magazine, captioned the picture with the word “socialism” and hung printed copies around L.A., making headlines.
According to Flickr, the image created by Mr Alkhateeb was removed from the site due to infringement of copyright in accordance with the DMCA. Okay, fair enough, Mr Alkhateeb didn’t own the rights to the original photograph so his derivative work can be interpreted as copyright infringement.
However.
Can’t the same argument be made in the case of Shepard Fairey and his use of copyright works to create his designs? Mark Vallen says yes and calls plagiarism. The HOPE poster created by Shepard Fairey is based on a copyrighted photograph taken in April 2006 by Mannie Garcia while on assignment for the Associated Press (Wikipedia). Mr Fairey stated his work falls under fair use, allowing limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders.
So how can Mr Fairey claim fair use but Mr Alkhateeb was in violation of copyright infringement? And if Flickr is so adamant about protecting copyright, then what about users who parody a product using the same illustrative style as Mr Fairey’s HOPE poster?
scope by salnunzio
Seems to me that Flickr isn’t playing by its own rules. In fact, a simple search for “Obama HOPE poster” pulls up pages of results where plagiarism fair use copyright infringement run rampant. So what gives?
A commenter on Gawker nicely surmised the issue with Flickr deleting the caricature of Obama:
It’s simple. We stand for no censorship, unless we don’t like the image. But in that case, it’s not censorship, it’s common sense.
Personally, I thought the “socialism” poster lacked meaning. As someone whose political leanings favor socialism, I didn’t see the connection between Obama – a moderate democrat — and Heath Ledger’s Joker who was known for his “why so serious?” tagline. In place of the word “socialism” I think the unknown designer would’ve done better to connect Obama’s policies with the Joker’s anarchist bent.
As for Mr Alkhateeb, I think he’s only proven Adobe’s stance that anyone can use Photoshop.