I went straight to the computer after something important. I was gonna tell some good news! Oh well.
When I got here I found out there was another issue. Let's just talk about that.

Shephard Fairey's Contest [link]

This thing creeps me out a lot.

Shephard Fairey is an amazing and accomplished artist that is wrapped around some very serious controversy. If you think about it the idea for the contest is very good since it's for a good " ' cause " - it's focused on equality for our gay brothers and sister. But I'm not touching that subject. I'm talking about Fairey and his "fair use"

For those of you who don't know, Fairey is in a lawsuit filed by the Associated Press. AP claimed that Fairey used one of their pictures of Obama and used it for his HOPE poster that Obama used throughout his campaign. The lawsuit is still pending.

If you look around deviantART, yo could see the many strong opinions of deviants for and against Fairey. Some satirically joined the contest with entries bashing Shephard Fairey.

But staffers of dA defended Fairey one of which you can see in $spyed's blog in #hq here [link] which is an anecdote of dA's Adviser in Chief $gzobel originally found here [link]




Now here is my opinion.

Let's say that Shepard Fairey has no hidden motives of using other artists' works as his own (as some deviants claim to be)


BUT

here is what I want to ask our dA authorities,

Can we now get copyrighted images of people on other sites, crop it, plaster a bunch filters and edits and post it on dA and claim it as our own!
Shephard Fairey can do it. Why not the rest of the world's artists?! He allegedly didn't earn anything from the poster and so will we not! WE just want to be an extraordinarily accomplished graphic
artist like Shepard Fairey dedicated to political and social activism. blah blah.
</endofsarcasm>


On a serious note, what I just meant was,
I thought deviantART was all about FAIR USE.
` preventing art theft
` not taking pics from search engines or other copyrighted sites
` rightfully crediting the right and exact resources

Now some guy, who is an artist and an extremely talented one for that matter, comes and tells people that since he made major edits with AP's photo and since he didn't earn money from that work means that it is fair use. And dA is there for him but not there for the other budding artists in deviantART who did the same. That's not very fair, is it?





I still love dA though