Whose Hope?

Shepard Fairey, who created the highly recognized "Hope" image of Barack Obama (and the near-ubiquitous OBEY line), filed a preemptive lawsuit claiming he did not violate The Associated Press's intellectual property rights (Famous Sister, weigh in!).

Fairey acknowledges his drawing was based on an AP photo of Obama before he was elected president. The AP last week claimed the drawing violated its copyright and demanded an undisclosed amount of compensation.

The Los Angeles street artist is claiming a fair use right. His New York federal court lawsuit said he transformed the picture into a "stunning, abstracted and idealized visual image that creates powerful new meaning and conveys a radically different message." Fairey reportedly found the image through an image search on Google. AP says the photo was taken April 2006 by Manny Garcia, who was on assignment for the wire service, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

The red, white and blue image was adorned on websites, posters, stickers, shirts and buttons, and has spurred an ongoing parade of parody images showing everyone from Sarah Palin ("Nope") to Heath Ledger ("Joke"). Paste magazine's easy-to-use, web-based Obamicon generator -- one of many online tools that make it easy to modify an picture to look like Fairey's poster -- has reportedly created more than 500,000 of the images.