Charles Apple

The BBC reports that earlier this year, the Democratic Unionist Party put this advertisement onto billboards across Northern Ireland:

Unfortunately, the young lady there wasn’t really a DUP supporter. She is a model for a stock photo agency. A designer for the Ulster Conservatives and Unionists party recognized the stock photo and wasted no time in setting up a response with another image from the same set:

D’oh!

Just on a lark, I zipped over to iStockPhoto and searched for “woman.” There were more than 837,000 hits. I’ll leave it to someone more bored than I to find the series of photos featuring our young Irish voter.

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UPDATE - 9:10 p.m.:

For all you wanna-be stalkers out there, this one’s for you:

There are seven freakin’ pages of her! Find the one with just the thumbs-up here.

Thanks, Max!

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Find the BBC story here. Thanks to PetaPixel for blogging this last week.

Wednesday, I ducked into Walmart — to buy garbage bags, Speed Stick and a copy of Newsweek, since you asked; but they didn’t have the Newsweek.

I came to a full stop, though, when I spotted this:

I’ve seen front-page T-shirts for sale before in gift shops and whatnot. But never in a Walmart. And I certainly didn’t expect to find Chicago Sun-Times front page apparel here in Virginia Beach, 800 miles from the Windy City.

I asked Sun-Times design director Eric White if he could explain. And he did:

Our Retail and Licensing Manager Sharon Dennis made a deal with a vendor to distribute our front page Obama T-shirts at Walmarts around the country.

According to Sharon, we’ve made over $50,000 on the shirts, which feature two of the covers celebrated by Oprah on her show — James Smith’s Nov. 5 “Mr. President” cover and the Jan. 21 “So Help Me God” cover which I designed.

We’re honored that thousands of Americans would want to celebrate Obama’s election by wearing pages from the Sun-Times. It’s a validation of what we do as journalists. And it’s another reminder that newspapers still hold a special place in people’s hearts. I haven’t seen anyone wearing snapshots of a web site.

We reported back in January that we found this little guy in our favorite Barnes & Noble:

That’s a 550-piece jigsaw puzzle featuring the post-Election Day front of the Boston Globe. All legit. Globe design chief Dan Zedek told us he hadn’t seen them. Which is good to hear; we think the page itself is nice but the design of the puzzle is rather ugly.

I failed to check the price of the Sun-Times apparel. I was too intent on taking my photo and texting to my e-mail account without incurring the wrath of the store’s security force.

Keep an eye out for them, though, the next time you run into Walmart for trash bags and Speed Stick.

The famous Obama “Change” poster has been used as campaign material, merchandised, copied, parodied… there’s even a web site that will turn your own photo into a lookalike poster.

But the original poster — designed by Shepard Fairey of Los Angeles — was based on a 2006 photo by Manny Garcia of the Associated Press.

In a wonderful example of closing the barn doors after the horses have left, the AP is now exercising its copyright. It’s demanding credit for the photo and a share of the proceeds.

The Associated Press reports:

“The Associated Press has determined that the photograph used in the poster is an AP photo and that its use required permission,” the AP’s director of media relations, Paul Colford, said in a statement.

Naturally, the other side disagrees:

“We believe fair use protects Shepard’s right to do what he did here,” says Fairey’s attorney, Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford University and a lecturer at the Stanford Law School. “It wouldn’t be appropriate to comment beyond that at this time because we are in discussions about this with the AP.”

Fairy says he found the AP photo using — you guessed it — a Google image search.

Find the AP story here.

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UPDATE:

John Telford — an Orlando-based graphics whiz, late of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – points out (in the comments to this post) that this isn’t the first time Shepard Fairey has been accused of ripping off other people. Here’s a whole web site devoted to documenting instances.

In addition, Daily Beast blogger James Danziger claimed a few weeks ago to have identified the photo Fairey used — a photo taken by a Reuters photographer. We feel like the AP photo is closer match, though. Even the eyes are the same.

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The Fair Use Project, by the way, is an incredible resource. We admit we were fuzzy ourselves on the concept until we spent a lot of time on their site and watched their videos. Bookmark it and give it a spin sometime.