Even after the 2013 case, the judge in Graham v. Prince found Prince’s total and full use of Graham’s image—without any alteration beyond adding some Instagram comments—does not lend itself to a clear-cut fair use argument. The case will now proceed to trial. If Prince loses (a big if) and the ruling is upheld on appeal (an even bigger if) the resulting precedent could reign in the broader fair use interpretation afforded to artists by the earlier ruling.

"Because Prince has reproduced Graham’s portrait without significant aesthetic alterations,
Untitled is not transformative as a matter of law. Moreover, Untitled [Richard Prince's Gagosian Gallery piece] is a work made with a distinctly commercial purpose; Graham’s original Rastafarian Smoking a Joint is, without question, expressive and creative in nature; Prince’s use of the entirety of Graham’s photograph weighs against a finding of fair use; and the Complaint adequately alleges usurpation of the primary market for Untitled. Accordingly, Prince’s motion to dismiss the Complaint is denied."

Again, the suit proceeds forward, but it's unclear if the suit was actually successful.

Caution: "Since 2013 the Copyright Alliance has partnered with New York based Cravath, Swaine and Moore LLP to assist in finding potential clients for an externship program at Columbia Law School to provide pro bono legal representation to individuals and small businesses in lawsuits involving cutting edge copyright issues. This case was one of the cases selected through that program."

Does not say whether the case AGAINST Prince was successful; importantly, that Prince's motion to DISMISS was not successful. Hmmmm...

Chapter 20 - Approaches to Active Reading and Visual Literacy in the High School Classroom

John S. O’Connor and Dan Lawler

The current round of experimentation follows a decadelong legal struggle over what libraries can and can’t do with copyrighted works. In 2005, Google’s mammoth Google Books scanning project became the focus of copyright-infringement lawsuits brought by the Authors Guild and publishers. The case dragged on for years, but courts ultimately found in Google vs. Authors Guild that Google’s scanning work constituted fair use. (The Supreme Court declined to hear the authors’ appeal in 2015.) HathiTrust Digital Library fought and won a similar copyright-infringement action brought against it in 2011 by the Authors Guild and other plaintiffs.

In October, the IA’s founder and digital librarian, Brewster Kahle, announced the debut of the Sonny Bono Memorial Collection. It’s named after the entertainer and California congressman who—much to the chagrin of those who felt copyright was already too restrictive—pushed to keep many 20th-century works about to enter the public domain locked up longer. Bono died not long before the passage of a 1998 law—not so fondly known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act—that extended the copyright life of works published in 1923 or later. Big rights-holders like the Walt Disney Co. benefited. The public did not.

In a move that might tick off Cher’s late ex-husband if he knew about it, the Sonny Bono collection consists entirely of post-1923 works. It exploits an underappreciated portion of Section 108, the statute that lays out the conditions under which libraries and archives may reproduce copyrighted material. Kahle and the Internet Archive, working with Tulane University Law professor Elizabeth Townsend-Gard and some of her students, zeroed in on Section 108(h). It permits libraries and archives to make copies of works that are in the last 20 years of their copyright term—“Last Twenty” works, the IA calls them—as long as they aren’t actively being sold and as long there’s not a copy available “at a reasonable price.”

This teacher scanned and uploaded the entire contents of "Past and Present" and Zinn's book to his course (public) website

Now features downloadable images in the public domain or using a CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) license

That's correct! All out-of-copyright items are free to use without restriction.

Richard Prince’s New Portraits exhibition closed last October, but the saga of his appropriated images, all taken with little alteration from the Instagram social media service, is having new legal repercussions. Hyperallergic has learned that a lawyer representing photographer Donald Graham has mailed cease and desist letters to Prince and the Gagosian Gallery over the unauthorized use of his photograph titled “Rastafarian Smoking a Joint, Jamaica.” The letters, which Hyperallergic was not able to obtain, reputedly ask Gagosian and Prince to stop exhibiting and/or distributing the Prince work and any other materials containing unauthorized reproductions of Graham’s work.

Kembrew McLeod, a self-described “professional art prankster” and media-studies professor at the University of Iowa (where I also teach), knows these fears well. McLeod wrote and executive-produced a documentary, “Copyright Criminals,” about the history of sampling and remix culture. The film featured more than four hundred unlicensed samples of copyrighted songs. McLeod believed that all of these samples were covered under fair use. Nevertheless, he was told at the start of his project, in 2003, that no one would ever insure or distribute such a film.

Mr. Prince used dozens of the pictures as the basis for a series of dystopian works called “Canal Zone,” which were exhibited at the Gagosian Gallery in 2008 and generated more than $10 million in sales. Cariou published Yes Rasta, “a book of [20] classical portraits and landscape photographs that he took over the course of six years spent living among Rastafarians in Jamaica.” He testified that the book was “extreme classical photography [and] portraiture,” and that he did not “want that book to look pop culture at all.” The book did not sell out of its initial printing of 7000, and fell out of print; almost 5800 copies were sold, almost 60% at a price below suggested retail of $60. The publisher paid him just over $8000. Except for a handful of private sales to acquaintances, he never sold or licensed individual photos.

His photographs were originally posted on TwitPic, a website that allows users to put pictures on Twitter, by Mr. Morel hours after the earthquake on Jan. 12, 2010. It was then reposted by a Twitter user named Lisandro Suero, who claimed they were his. Agence France-Presse took the photos from TwitPic and distributed them to clients. Getty Images distributed the photos in the United States.

"If I'm using it for purposes of critique, then I can use if even if I don't have permission of the original copyright owner," he says. Liberation Music eventually backed down. But Lessig decided to invoke another part of the copyright law, "which basically polices bad-faith lawsuits," he says — threats made fraudulently or without proper basis. Lessig is suing Liberation Music because he wants labels to stop relying on automated systems to send out takedown notices, he says.

However, five works—Graduation, Meditation, Canal Zone (2008), Canal Zone (2007), and Charlie Company—weren’t sufficiently different from the photos for the court to be confident that they were transformative as a matter of law.

You'll perhaps remember NEWSgrist's coverage of Blanch v. Koons (Nov. 2005): Jeff Koons had won a summary judgment in a case he took on when commercial photographer Andrea Blanch sued him for copyright infringement; Blanch appealed, and has lost. This...

Kind of Blue / Kind of Bloop case settled out of court

1201

On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by federal authorities in connection with systematic downloading of academic journal articles from JSTOR.[8][9] Swartz opposed JSTOR’s practice of compensating publishers, rather than authors, out of the fees it charges for access to articles. Swartz contended that JSTOR’s fees were limiting public access to academic work that was being supported by public funding.

Media Education Lab

From Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog

Settled out of court for an undisclosed sum of money.

In creating this Op-Doc animation, I copied well-known images and photographs, retraced innumerable drawings, then photocopied them as a way to underscore the un-originality of the entire process.

When the case began in 2009, Mr. Fairey argued that his use of Associated Press imagery constituted fair use under copyright law. But the civil lawsuit was settled before that question was decided, and the two sides agreed to financial terms that were not disclosed.

by David Lowery

Star Trek, Daily Show, Dollhouse

Uses stills from Star Trek

Just uses attribution. Has no idea what fair use is.