Copyright infringement, Obama and you.

We frequently hear from clients that they want a simple solution to image licensing. They don’t want to come back to us over and over to re-negotiate additional uses. That’s fine with us, since we will happily create a comprehensive photography usage license that covers all the options you can think of.

The important thing is that the clients understand that the images we create belong to us. When it’s created, it’s copyrighted. And our intellectual property is ultimately what we’re selling–no matter how long it takes us to create it.

Some clients don’t understand that photographs are the intellectual property of their creator (or whomever the creator may have transferred the copyright to). One such example appears to be NORML–the National Association for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. NORML recently contracted with an artist to create a poster utilizing a soon-to-be iconic image of a then-college-aged Barack Obama smoking a cigarette. The problem is, neither NORML nor the artist licensed the image.

A similar problem happened during Obama’s campaign, when superstar poster artist Shephard Fairey repurposed a photograph of Obama into the definitely iconic HOPE posters that became the face of the campaign. That battle is still being fought in copyright court, with Fairey arguing that the image was changed enough to become a new work, bearing its own new copyright. It’s a challenge to determine, that’s for sure. And it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

The NORML poster, though, does not appear to have the same legal footing on which to stand. The design of the poster–which NORML and the artist argue is protected as satire–includes what is essentially a large hole in the center into which the virtually unmodified photograph has been placed. To my eye, along with the photographer, the licensing agency (Getty) and many others, it certainly looks like copyright infringement. But that’s for the courts to decide. This, too, will be an interesting case to watch.

Read more about the NORML poster at The Washington Post and Photo District News. The latest on Fairey’s HOPE poster can be found at The New York Times.

And remember that in all of these cases, the (perhaps sought after) media hullaballoo could have been avoided if the poster-creating clients in each instance had simply licensed the photographs for fair usage. No matter how expensive it might have been to create the face of a presidential campaign, I’m guessing it’s far less expensive than the impending legal battle.

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