Flickr Censors Obama Joker Image

August 21, 2009 by Infowars Ireland

Photo website takes down Joker picture citing fraudulent copyright claim

The online photo-sharing giant Flickr has banned the Obama Joker image from its website, citing flimsy copyright claims which aren’t even applicable, in the latest attempt to chill free speech.

The image had received over 20,000 page views on the Flickr website before it was pulled for apparent “copyright-infringement concerns,” due to the Time Magazine logo appearing in the picture.

Flickr’s claim that the image represents an infringement of copyright doesn’t stand up when one fully examines the law. The image clearly constitutes a derivative work and is perfectly legal.

“For copyright protection to attach to [a derivative work]…. it must display some originality of its own. It cannot be a rote, uncreative variation on the earlier, underlying work. The latter work must contain sufficient new expression, over and above that embodied in the earlier work for the latter work to satisfy copyright law’s requirement of originality,” reads one description of derivative copyright law.

Since simply putting a moustache on the Mona Lisa constitutes a legal “derivative work,” it is preposterous to claim that the Obama as Joker image, which is vastly different to the original Time photo of Obama, represents copyright infringement simply because the logo has not been removed. Indeed, there have been dozens of spoof front pages of Time Magazine posted on the Internet over the last decade. Read full article…