Artists Beware - Art Reference Alert - Copyright Police Hell is Here.

I'll bet this is not the first time an 'abuse of art references' has come to court, but it's the most prominent case to date.  The infamous graffiti artist and icon-maker Shepard Fairey is in court on accusation that his 2008 image of then-president-elect Barack Hussein Obama aka Barry Soetoro (which basically got him the gig, if fair's fair) was taken from an Associated Press image of the man, and not some story he made up about how the shot came into his hands.
Let's have a look at the facts.
An Artist is in Court APOLOGISING for blatantly using Reference Images, or for at least making up a story about the real source of such. Great, then let's take renowned Irish artist Francis Bacon to court (in absentia) for blatantly copying images he found in books, for his delightful and delicious psycho-figurative paintings. Let's strip him of all his worldwide fame, the thieving fucker.
And I know (and have defended) several artists on this blog for their use of direct reference to SOME OTHER CUNT'S COPYRIGHTED IMAGE. I don't give a shit. The artistic process is about turning whatever turd you find on the street into something personal, something special. Screw your scrooging demand of ownership on a combination of printed dots on a page or a combination of pixels on a screen.
Lawyers trawling the net for 'copyright infrigement' of either story, art, photo content is WORSE, many times worse, than the way those same lawyers used to chase after ambulances in the 70's. We frowned upon that. Now we're glorifying all forms of Legal Recourse like it's Open Season. Every fool and his/her mother's an active soldier in the Corporate War Game of divide and conquer, mine mine mine. It's all a very sad sick case of those who think they have an Empire to protect shitting all over real Creativity, real Passion and real Kinship on this broken homeworld, in the name of financial reparation aka profit.
I'm sure there'll come some law at some point that (because of the way the rods are arranged in the human eye) it'll become ILLEGAL for an Artist to look at i.e. 'locally copy into his brain via that visual combination of rods' for later artistification ANY EVENT OR MOMENT in time or place, in case he's breaching a future copyright claim against 'supposed' ownership of such. Legal World is a totally alien place to where the humans live and represents the death of all Creativity, Passion and Kinship, for our children's children. Legal World is 1984 Thought Crime in its most legislatable-against form.