We were more surprised by the fact that Rick Ross is one of Mr. Brainwash's latest collectors than we are that a judge isn't buying his fair use argument. In the particular case of Mr. Brainwash's Sid Vicious street mural (on La Brea in Los Angeles), the federal judge disputed his claim for fair use, saying that “most of [the] defendant’s works add certain new elements, but the overall effect of each is not transformative."
Many people dismiss Mr. Brainwash's work as a cheesy ripoff of Banksy, one of his mentors, and as recently as 2011, he lost a copyright case to Glen Friedman over a Run DMC image. The Sid Vicious image case will go to trial in July, and even if we're on the fence about the quality of his work, we hope it's not as messy at the Shepard Fairey case over fair use of an AP photographer's Obama image.
[via TheArtNewspaper]
