No prison for Obama 'Hope' poster artist
Los Angeles street artist Shepard Fairey poses in front of the Barack Obama Hope artwork he designed in the Echo Park area of Los Angeles. (Jan. 12, 2009) Credit: AP Photo Damian Dovarganes
Overriding the prosecutor's call for jail time, a federal magistrate in Manhattan on Friday sentenced the artist who created the Barack Obama "Hope" poster in 2008 to community service for tampering with evidence in a civil suit brought by The Associated Press.
U.S. Magistrate Frank Maas conceded that a non-prison sentence for contempt of court orders in the civil case might send a "terrible message," but he said graphic artist Shepard Fairey, 42, had already paid $1.6 million to the AP and felt the sting of damage to his reputation.
"Punishment has been and will be exacted in the form of public disgrace," Maas told Fairey, whose poster became the iconic symbol of Obama's insurgent campaign four years ago.
The judge sentenced Fairey to 300 hours of community service, placed him on probation for two years, and ordered him to pay a $25,000 fine.
Fairey, who told Maas he was "deeply ashamed," said in a statement issued after the sentencing that he still felt he had made "fair use" of an AP photo to create the poster and regretted that his evidence-tampering had clouded the issues of artists' rights that he had tried to raise.
"The damage to my own reputation is dwarfed by the regret I feel for clouding the issues of the Fair Use case. I let down artists and advocates for artists' rights by distracting from the core Fair Use discussion with my misdeeds," he said.
Fairey filed suit in 2009 against the AP to pre-empt copyright actions the news organization was threatening. His lawsuit mistakenly identified the AP Obama picture he had used as the source of the poster, and in his guilty plea he admitted that when he discovered his error he tampered with records to hide the truth from both the AP and his lawyers.
A key issue in the copyright case was the degree to which Fairey had "transformed" the news photo. The photo he actually used bore a closer resemblance to the poster than the one he claimed.
Prosecutors told Maas a non-jail sentence might encourage evidence tampering. "It suggests that if you're otherwise a good person you will not have your liberty taken away for conduct of this type," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Levy.
Fairey says he made no profits directly off the poster, but prosecutors in court papers said that as his fame grew -- the poster is now in the National Portrait Gallery -- profits of his commercial art businesses doubled from $2.9 million in 2007 to $6 million in 2009.
