Intellectual property Blog post and Comment Assignment
Mayra’s definition of intellectual property: It refers to the right of owning one’s personal creation or invention and therefore cannot be use or copy by anyone without the permission of its owner.
Obama Campaign Poster: Shepherd Fairey versus AP’s Mannie Garcia
Shepherd Fairey created a poster for the Obama campaign that became quite popular and therefore lucrative based on one of Mannie Garcia’s pictures, without the permission of the owner of the photograph Mannie Garcia, or the acknowledgement that the photograph was taken by Mannie Garcia.
My Opinion to this topic
I think that Fairey’s work in the Obama poster was creative enough that he did not have to hide the fact that the picture was Mannie Garcia’s pictures. The poster would have had the same response even if the picture was not his. I think that it was wrong that he took full credit for the work, and I am glad that there is a law that protects people’s rights of their own work. Intellectual Property is something that needs to be respected at all times, failure to do so will prevent designers and inventors from being acknowledged from their work.
A personal story about intellectual property issues
My little sister and I wanted to have our own brand in fashion. We wanted to create a clothing line were my sister would start wearing our designed outfits to school in order to advertise and then sell our products. First we started by sewing but it took too much time and effort so I thought of the idea of just buying white plain t-shirts to decorate them and put our brand name on them, this would an intellectual property issue because I would be taking whole credit for the design of the t-shirts by putting my brand name on them. So we decided we could not do that and therefore we will have to sew everything in order to put our name on it.
Links:
http://www.coolhunting.com/archives/2008/01/shepard_fairey.php
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/shepard-fairey-sues-associated-press-over-obama-poster/
http://hypebeast.com/2009/01/shepard-fairey-talks-about-barack-obama-campaign-poster/
