Official Portrait For Pope's US Visit... Being Investigated For Copyright Infringement

from the the-holy-copyright-infringement dept

The previous pope, Benedict XVI a few years ago made some waves by suggesting that intellectual property had gone too far, saying:

On the part of rich countries there is excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property...

The current Pope may now be at the center of a copyright dispute as well. Apparently, Pope Francis is heading to the US in a few weeks. And, as a part of this, apparently someone asked Philadelphia pop artist Perry Milou to create an "official" portrait of the Pope for his tour. And he did: As a story at Buzzfeed notes, that portrait is on nearly everything related to the Pope's official visit to Philadelphia. It's on the website of the group organizing the visit: And it's being sold on all sorts of merchandise: You can even buy the original painting, if you have $1 million to spare: There's... uh... just one problem. Getty Images claims that the portrait is based on a photo that it holds the rights to, taken by Italian photographer Franco Origlia. You can see that photo here: And the two images side by side: And, yup, it seems pretty clear that Milou found that image and made his painting based on that.

And most normal people would agree that this should be perfectly fine. Creating the painting is absolutely transformative. It doesn't take away from the rights of the original photograph and certainly is not a replacement for the original photograph and might even make the original photograph more recognizable and more in demand.

But, we live in the real world where copyright extremists freak out about just about anything. And Getty, for one, has a reputation as quite the copyright troll.

And, tragically, Getty is probably remembering what happened the last time a well known "pop artist" created a big recognizable portrait of someone based on a photograph held by a news agency: the infamous Sheppard Fairey/Obama Hope poster, that was based on a photo by photographer Manny Garcia, but where the Associated Press held the copyright: In that case, even though many believe that Fairey had a really strong fair use claim, Fairey himself fucked it up by destroying evidence and lying, pretending that he had used a different photograph as the base. This was a really bad decision, because it poisoned the waters for a nice fair use defense, and got Fairey in deeper hot water. And, eventually that case was just settled.

One hopes that, should Getty go legal, that Milou doesn't follow Fairey's lead, and actually mounts a strong fair use defense. One would think that, at the very least, he'd have the Pope on his side, and that can't hurt.

Of course, given the ridiculous freakouts about these people daring to paint portraits based on news photographs, we're still wondering why no one ever threatened to sue former President George W. Bush for his paintings of famous world leaders that were also based on Google Image search results. Remember this masterpiece by the former President painting Russian leader Vladimir Putin based on the first result in Google Images at the time? Somehow, no one decided to sue President Bush...

Filed Under: copyright, fair use, perry milou, pope, pope francis, portrait, shepard fairey
Companies: getty, getty images