Last November, the New York daily Newsday ran a front-page story on virtual reality. It turns out the real story was not the content of the article but the cover picture - a man and woman with TV-set heads charging madly about the landscape. Stock photo company FPG International claims Newsday created that picture by scanning one of FPG photographer James Porto's copyrighted images and combining it with other images. In February the company took Newsday, its publisher, and two members of its art department to court in Manhattan with a copyright infringement lawsuit for US$1.4 million.
From the photos shown here, it looks like FPG won't have a hard time proving Newsday lifted the figures of the man and woman straight out of Porto's image. As she embarked on the legal process, FPG president Barbara Roberts held that "there is a misbelief among the new 'desktop' designers that the law has yet to catch up to the new-age technology of digital imaging. In fact, the existing copyright laws are more than adequate." Recent case law suggests she's right. Rapper Biz Markie was found to have infringed the copyright of a song when he sampled it on one of his album tracks, and, in another case, a BBS infringed when it distributed digitized images from the pages of Playboy.
Still, Newsday did not simply copy the FPG image but rather cut out pieces of it and combined them in new ways. On the Newsday cover, the figures are turned around, the money they were holding in their hands erased, and the clock faces on their necks replaced with TV sets. The bodies of the figures are the same, but the look and meaning of the pictures are entirely different.
Ironically, FPG's "source" images themselves are composite images, strikingly so in the case of the people with the clock-face heads. Did the photographers create all the components of these images themselves, and if not, did they clear the rights with their owners?
We also have to wonder whether Newsday and its staffers have become just a bit woozy in the rarefied air of the digital era (Newsday has refused to comment on the case). The Newsday artist who lifted the image is, according to FPG, the same one who created the famous fake picture of Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan skating closely together during the Winter Olympics.
Ultimately, the case against Newsday is really about whether there is a right way and a wrong way to use the images of others, a question many artists have refused to recognize - from Jeff Koons (who's been found by two courts to be a rip-off artist) on down.
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