The Strobist retweeted a link today to A Photo Editor, who had an opinion piece on the Some Kind of Bloop controversy a few weeks ago.

For those of you who didn’t hear about it, here’s the backstory, in a nutshell.

Andy Baio had a music project where he basically reproduced a Miles Davis work, Some Kind of Blue, as a chiptune tribute. He had a friend recreate the original album cover by hand as an eight-bit style reproduction. Baio made a point of securing all the music rights for the project, but forgot to get permission for the album cover. Jay Maisel, the photographer behind the original image, sued. Baio settled, and subsequently blogged about the experience.

Then things turned ugly.

What you might not know, is that Andy Baio could be considered one of the “cool kids” on the Internet. He is a popular web personality along the lines of Jason Kottke, John Gruber and Merlin Mann, with a sizable following.

Jay Maisel, for his part, is a well known, respected photographer. And if you follow any photography sites like I do, you’ll realize that professional photographers are near rabid (and rightly so) about their intellectual property rights.

What erupted was an ugly war of words, with major web personalities like Gruber and Thomas Hawk unfurling a series of posts siding with Baio. It is also notable that Hawk has since deleted his series of strongly worded commentary.

On the other side, you had the outraged photographers railing against “freetards” like Andy Baio. Many major online photographers have had their work copied, transformed or reposted without their permission, so it’s easy to understand how this topic could elicit some raw feelings.

While I think this whole affair could have been handled differently, Jay Maisel was completely within his rights to go after Andy Baio. He was also completely within his rights to be, in Gruber’s words, a “dick”, about it. In the same way, Gruber is well within his rights to publicly call out people whom he considers to be a “chickenshit” for failing to attribute links properly. We’re definitely talking in shades of grey.

Because I happen to subscribe to a lot of content from both sides of the fence, it has been a little more than irksome reading about this whole affair. I can see some validity in the arguments on both sides, but in true Internet fashion, anonymous commenters (trolls, if you will) from both sides came out of the woodwork and ruined any possible chance of reasonable discourse on the matter.

It’s a shame that this didn’t go to the courts, because we’d at least get some clarity out of this dispute.

There is no doubt in my mind that Some Kind of Bloop’s cover image is in some form a reproduction inspired by Maisel’s original image. Having said that, I have no doubt that it’s an artist’s unique interpretation of that image, and not just a resampled digital copy. I also give Baio the benefit of the doubt in that I believe that his failure to secure rights from Maisel in advance was an honest oversight.

Speaking as a normal, reasonable person and not as a lawyer or judge, it does appear on the surface to be a fair use of the original image. We all need to remind ourselves that inspiration typically comes from the previous works of others. In other words, everything is a remix.

Finally, some food for thought. I leave you with a lovely link on artists getting paid, courtesy of John Gruber.

Tags: copyright, jay maisel, andy baio, john gruber, thomas hawk, fair use, everything is a remix