This Is The Mona Lisa…
For the above image I used a picture of the Mona Lisa. After heavily filtering, resizing and tweaking this is the result. Am I infringing on copyright? (The Mona Lisa probably isn’t copyrighted, but that is beside the point)
There’s a great discussion going on over at mezzloblue on this very subject. Dave’s post Design Theft: Crossing the Line is generating a variety of ideas concerning the nature of copyright.
Personally, I remembered Sherrie Levine and her work which involves direct challenges to copyright. Also, many artists incorporate copyrighted images into their work. Techniques such as painting photos or newspaper clippings into the canvas (Robert Rauschenberg, etc.) as well as some collage artists would probably be considered copyright infringement by some of the commenters here.
I think people might be overlooking some facts about image copyright. I’m not a lawyer, but from what I have read copyrighted images can be used without the author’s permission if the use falls under “fair use.” What “fair use” is is somewhat hazy, but aspects of it allow the image to be used/copied if the use does not affect the author’s ability to market their image.
Another aspect of “fair use” is how much of the orginal work is being copied. It the example at mezzoblue, the 150px image shown could have been a crop from a 3500px panorama. Sampling this small section would most likely come under “fair use.”
Finally, in the example case presented at mezzoblue we are also dealing with extreme data filtering. The original image data is mathmatically altered by the artist to a final form where the original no longer exists. This certainly is not copyright infringement any more than writing this comment is. (I didn’t come up with all this stuff myself. I researched copyright law, representative artists, etc.. I then used my mind to process the data available into this post)