No jail time for presidential poster boy
Date September 9, 2012
Destroyed and faked evidence ... Los Angeles street artist Shepard Fairey. Photo: AP
SHEPARD FAIREY, the artist who created an iconic 2008 election poster of Barack Obama based on an Associated Press photo, has been sentenced to 300 hours of community service for destroying documents and manufacturing evidence in a copyright suit with the news agency over the image.
Fairey, of Los Angeles, was also ordered to pay a $US25,000 ($24,178) fine by the magistrate, Frank Maas, in Manhattan federal court. Fairey pleaded guilty in February and faced up to six months in jail.
Fairey, 42, apologised for his actions, calling them ''the worst thing I've ever done in my life''.
The plea stemmed from a civil copyright case Fairey and AP settled last year. He had sued AP in 2009, seeking a ruling that his poster did not infringe the copyright because his use of the photograph was protected by ''fair use''. The news organisation countersued.
Assistant US Attorney Daniel Levy urged Mr Maas to sentence Fairey to some time in jail or in a halfway house. ''This was extraordinarily serious litigation misconduct,'' he said.
Fairey's lawyer, Daniel Gitner, argued that his client had agreed to pay $US1.6 million to AP to settle the civil suit and to compensate the news service for his misconduct.
In support of Mr Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, Fairey made posters using a stylised likeness of the candidate with the words ''Hope'' and ''Progress'' below the images, relying on a photograph copyrighted by AP, according to the government.
In his complaint, Fairey claimed he used as a visual reference an AP photograph of Mr Obama and the actor George Clooney at an April 2006 National Press Club event, according to prosecutors. In fact, Fairey used another image from the same event - a tightly cropped image of Obama gazing up, which was also an AP photograph, the government said.
To cover up his false complaint, Fairey created multiple fraudulent documents attempting to show that he had used the photograph of Mr Obama and Clooney and he tried to delete electronically stored documents that demonstrated that he had used the tightly cropped image, prosecutors said.
''I accept the judge's sentence and look forward to finally putting this episode behind me,'' Fairey said in a written statement distributed after the hearing.
