Shepard Fairey Destroys Evidence, Goodwill; Harms His Case For No Good Reason

from the grow-up dept

On Friday morning, someone "working with" Shepard Fairey alerted me that some news was coming out that day about his lawsuit with the Associated Press over his famous Barack Obama poster:

I finally got the "official" statement from Fairey late on Friday, just as I was about to leave work for the weekend, and the whole thing was so ridiculous that I just figured I'd leave it until today. Apparently, Fairey, for absolutely no good reason, tried to destroy evidence and then lie about which photo he actually used to make his poster. He's now come clean about this, and while he's right in his statement that this shouldn't have any impact on the underlying case, it certainly doesn't help. It was already pretty well known that Fairey was hardly the poster child of fair use -- given that he has a history of going after others who copy his own work, despite being an "appropriation artist" himself. But, even so, this is beyond dumb -- something I don't say lightly.

Fairey still has a very strong fair use claim -- which is entirely separate from the question of whether or not Fairey did something incredibly stupid here. Even if he used the image the AP claimed he did (which he now admits), it still seems like this is an obvious case of fair use. But destroying evidence and lying -- especially when there was no good reason to do so -- just harms his credibility and makes it that much more likely that he'll lose his case not for any legitimate reason, but because of his own separate actions in dealing with this case. There are important fair use issues at play here, and Fairey just made it that much harder to maintain the high ground.

While some are pointing out that this is the sort of thing that happens when copyright laws always seem to stack the deck against fair use, that's still no excuse for lying and trying to destroy evidence. Yes, the system sucks, but doing something like this only harms an otherwise strong case.

31 Comments | Leave a Comment..

Michael Robertson Wants To Crowdsource Proof Of EMI's Lies: You Lie EMI Bookmarklet Available

from the have-fun-with-it dept

EMI has been involved in a lawsuit with MP3Tunes for a while now. The whole lawsuit seems weird, since MP3Tunes is about creating a storage locker for the songs you already have. But one of the points that MP3Tunes made in response to EMI's claims is that EMI was lying in saying that it has never authorized MP3s to be available online. Yet, MP3Tunes had found plenty of promotional tracks that EMI had clearly put online, and it was wondering why others were allowed to link to them, but EMI claimed it was infringement for MP3Tunes to point to those same songs. In presenting this point in court, MP3Tunes has been looking for more evidence of authorized EMI mp3s, and Michael Robertson has announced the "You Lie EMI" bookmarklet (found via Hypebot), that lets anyone help MP3Tunes find more authorized EMI mp3s. Basically, as you surf around, if you come across authorized songs that are available, you can click the bookmarklet, and it checks to see if the artists is an EMI artist, and then lets you submit the details. Whatever happens with the lawsuit itself, it's cool to see someone crowdsourcing data for their defense.

6 Comments | Leave a Comment..

Does Email Make You Lie More?

from the just-a-little-bit dept

Does a more impersonal means of communication make it easier to... stretch the truth? Apparently, a new study found that people tend to lie more in email when compared to a written note (paper?!? pens?!?). The study involved people being given a pool of money and asked to divide it with someone else, who they could communicate with either via email or via written note. While pretty much everyone lied about the total amount of money, those who communicated over email lied by even bigger amounts. The writeup doesn't really suggest why this is, but it makes you wonder what factors could be involved. People often talk about how sitting at a keyboard can make people "mean," but they usually attribute it to the anonymity factor. However, could the "coldness" of typed words feel less personal as well?

18 Comments | Leave a Comment..