Results tagged “copyright”

• The Boston City Council voted 12-1 to approve a new firefighters contract the union and Mayor Menino agreed to on Tuesday. [WCVB]

• It took less than a week for a newly hired MBTA bus driver to break the agency's cell phone ban. [Boston Herald]

Does Sarah Palin really have any significant impact on Boston? Fortunately, no. Governor Community Organizer/Private citizen Palin just quit as Alaska's leader after a rambling sharply focused public statement. more ›

Our old friend, street artist slash vandalist slash conspiracy victim Shepard Fairey speaks out on his own site and in the Huffington Post about his alleged copyright infringement in using an AP photo to produce his now-infamous posters of Barack Obama. Fairey continually uses the word "reference," and points to great artists who worked from photos. However, Fairey doesn't clarify how he used the photo: was he just glancing at it as he worked, or did he (as it almost looks) just Photoshop the original image to come up with "his" artwork? And if he did "just" Photoshop the image, is that sufficient artistic contribution to constitute originality? more ›

We’d always thought the CEOs of music corporations would look something like Cerberus, the three-headed dog: devouring artists, drinking up their creative talent, and vomiting mass-appeal. At Berklee last Friday, though, Terry McBride appeared as something slightly more than the complete opposite. McBride is the CEO and co-founder of the Nettwerk music group, the company responsible for breaking Coldplay and managing the Lilith Fair. But also for allowing hip-hop-phenom K-OS to release artist and fan mixes of his new album, and tour under a “pay-as-you-leave” model similar to how Radiohead released In Rainbows. more ›

Yes, we thought we'd done our last Shepard Fairey post of the month, too. But that was before it came to our attention, via Dan Kennedy, our favorite Northeastern prof, that Shepard Fairey might be a little less than consistent when it comes to his reading of copyright law. The street artist, who faces a legal battle with the Associated Press over the photo of Barack Obama that he "referenced" to make his iconic Obama "Hope" poster, has sent his own cease-and-desist letter to Baxter Orr, an Austin, Texas artist who has made a derivative work that pokes fun at Fairey's trademark "Obey Giant." So it's Obey what I say, not what I do? Copylefters, can you still justify this guy? [Dan Wasserman] more ›

Alleged plagiarist/vandalist, would-be DJ, and street artist Shepard Fairey has creatively turned the tables on the AP, preemptively suing the organization for his supposed appropriation of an AP image in the now-infamous Barack Obama "Hope" poster. The AP had asked Fairey to pony up for use of Obama's face; in response, Fairey and his lawyers (including Anthony T. Falzone of the Fair Use Project) claim Fairey created a “stunning, abstracted and idealized visual image that created powerful new meaning and conveys a radically different message" from the AP photo. Will "fair use" be known as "Fairey use" from now on? We eagerly await a decision. more ›

On Friday, Creative Commons founder, former Electronic Freedom Frontier board member, and copyright-turned-corruption guru Lawrence Lessig announced that he will be returning to Harvard to serve as a professor of law and faculty director of Harvard's Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, continuing his recent anti-corruption work. Lessig was on hand Friday night to reacquaint himself with Harvard, sitting on a Creative Commons panel with James Boyle, Joi Ito, and Molly S. Van Houweling. The group was moderated by Jonathan Zittrain. The main theme of the evening pitted a tradition of control vs. a future of sharing. more ›