I'm not sure whether to be more horrified at the theft or the poor quality of the design he made.

Yeah, if you're going to go to all that trouble, at least make it attractive.

I believe the newseum pdfs are secure/password files. Can't rasterize or in some cases import. He'd have to jump thru some hoops to make it work.

screenshots perhaps?

check out his "illustrations" too.

uh oh... i see comic sans!!!

Mac OS X's Preview application can open and edit PDFs while not following Adobe security. Ghostview ( found here http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/) has similiar functionality. Also, with as crappy as that page is, he may have just used the newseum jpgs.

I think we're talking about a woman here, folks. From Pat's Website a not-so-interesting tale:

"Pappy, are you a boy or a girl?"
My 4 year old grand niece asked me this question one day in the movie theatre while watching "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron" about a wild horse whose freedom is threatened. I was 57 at the time. I tried to reply, as matter-of-factly as possible, "I'm a girl, honey," since I'd never been asked this question before in all my years. "Oh," she said. And, then went back to watching the movie. I didn't know why she was confused and I was afraid to ask. Maybe it was my short hair-cut, but after a few minutes I was just grateful she hadn't asked, "Pappy, are you a boy, girl or a horse?" This has become a story in our family, told and retold, accompanied by laughter and sets of rolling eyes. If it were a stone, it would be warm, smoothed and shiny from being passed hand-to-hand over dining room tables, living room couches or across porch chairs.

Hmm. Good point, Nicole.

Is it going to be worth any of these paper's time, energy and lawyers' time to go after someone like this? Or would most go after something like this on priciple alone?

oops ... papers'

It's not theft, any more than taking a photo of somebody in public is stealing his or her soul. Am I not allowed to take a photo of the side-by-side newspaper vending machines displaying such pages and call it art? How about whipping out my brush and dashing off an oil painting? What happened to fair use?

"Copyright" nonsense has gotten way out of hand, as the Washington Nationals' imminent name change to the Washington Natsxxxindc64071@aol.com (it was the only name not previously thought of) is proving.

In fair use, the public is entitled to use portions of copyrighted materials forpurposes of commentary and criticism.

Fair use can be very subjective, but this poster collage is not commentary or criticism.

Theft or not, it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I'm not going to demnonish the person for it, but it's definitely not something I myself would feel comfortable doing.

One would think that the NFL's lawyers would come calling first - the poster does carry that "Superbowl" (sic) trademark that the league protects so closely, after all.

Who knows, the NFL's lawyers might even "demnonish" her/him/it for it. Is that what happens when you demonize someone and admonish them at the same time?

Perhaps fair use is the wrong concept. How about "added value"? This person isn't taking somebody else's poster and selling it as her own. She's creating a poster from elements that were not a poster before. Perhaps the Newseum, if it did not grant permission, has some claim to the fruits of its reproduction labor, but I don't think it's a copyright issue.

Proceeds from a poster of the Empire State Building do not go to the architect's estate (or do they? I'm not sure anything in this realm would surprise me anymore).

Bill,

I dunno about the Empire State Building, but we've got a statue here in town, Portlandia, that sits on a public building, and if you try to sell a poster of it, I believe the artist will come down on you like a ton of, uh, hammered copper.

I think you're right that "copyright nonsense" has gotten out of hand, and in thinking about this more, this might not be "theft." But thinking about copyright law makes my teeth hurt.

I would still think that reselling another newspaper's front for profit is violating a copyright law. But, unfortunately, most of my media law class went in one ear and out the other.

Newspaper front pages are copyrighted. Seems like it's a pretty easy argument to make -- this guy's capitalizing off someone else's copyrighted material. Paging the intellectual-rights attorneys... "demnonish" away (thanks, Scott -- by the way, I've enjoyed your site -- and the tower site of the week -- for a few years).

Nobody is reselling a newspaper's front page. Somebody is compiling old front pages to create a completely different thing. Pretty much everything is copyrighted, and I don't think all posters are forbidden.

Again, however, I'm talking about a common-sense world and not one in which the guy who thought up one-click Web checkout can demand royalties from Amazon.com and be taken seriously. (Wonder how Jules Verne's family is doing with those NASA royalties ...)

Yes, yes, copyright infringement! And that Andy Warhol guy should be executed for stealing all those soup cans he stole.

Has anyone asked Pat for comment? There's some interesting discussion going on here. Pat might offer a little perspective or depth. Or an answer. Maybe not. But if you haven't clicked on her link yet, do so. This Super Bowl page is in company with the Pope, Katrina, 9/11...quite the Newseum Museum there.

C'mon, people. It's a SHE, not a HE. Did anyone really READ what was written in the blog?

;-)

At one of my former papers, we used to run a full-page poster that celebrated state championship teams and the winner of our big in-state college football rivalry game. We would sell reprints of the pages for $6 a pop.

Then one day I was walking though the mall and saw the main photo from our Rivalry Game poster for sale at one of those sports-memorabilia kiosks. Someone had bought a stack of our posters for $6 each, had cut out the main photo, stuck it in a nice frame with a mat, and added a small brass plaque with the score of the game and the date. They were selling for $300. The photographer's name was nowhere. The paper's name was nowhere.

Now, I'm not a big fan of restrictive and over-used copyright rules, but c'mon. This guy was clearly making a huge profit off someone elses' ... namely OUR ... work. Is that right? I don't think so. This Pittsburgh Steelers example, while ugly, is doing the same thing.

If we open the door for things like this and my former paper's example, when does it end? Where is the line drawn? What we do has value, that's why our bosses compete for our talents and pay us. When we allow people to take our creations and sell them for profit, we devalue our own creations.

Nolan said:

"At one of my former papers, we used to run a full-page poster that celebrated state championship teams and the winner of our big in-state college football rivalry game. We would sell reprints of the pages for $6 a pop."

My hometown paper did this same thing with the professional football, baseball and hockey teams when they were in the playoffs and when one member of my hometown baseball team reached and then broke a big Major League record. On a tour of their offices seven years after the fact, I saw they were still selling reprints for about $6 a page.

Wasn't your former newspaper, and mine, simply doing the same thing these people have done -- captializing off a team's accomplishment? You said this guy bought the items for $6 a pop, and while I might argue he should attribute the photo, it's entirely possible he could argue the $294 markup was for his time and effort to make/obtain the brass plates and frame each one. People have paid more for less. I find it quite absurd that he owes your photographer anything for selling it, though.

As to the NFL's strictly-protected Super Bowl logo, they must not have gotten too mad that my paper, along with nearly every other one in the country, used this years logo in particular (the "XL" is soooo catchy, you know) in headlines and other graphics throughout the paper. I mean, when we blew it up so that the letters were about 72 points in a Food section headline that said "XL-ent snacks," I guess we should have forked over a few pennies. Nevermind the fact it moved over AP's graphics wire almost everyday for weeks leading up to the event.

I agree it's a bit sneaky and probably something I wouldn't feel good doing. But, especially in this case, where the size and presentation has been altered and the poster as a whole is adding value by compiling the front pages, as Bill said, I don't think it's illegal. Couldn't this woman simply claim the cost would be to cover her labor in finding and compiling these photos? While each piece of the poster comes from copyrighted material, they collectively form an original work.

That, and people will pay top dollar for almost anything on eBay. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to go make a watermelon look like Pamela Anderson.

So, Niko, if I take one AP photo of the Super Bowl, one Reuters and one Getty, montage them and frame it, I'm in the clear to sell it for $300 to gullible, buy-anything sports fans? I'm guessing not, and I don't see how it's different from this lame poster.

Like I said, I'd argue you'd have to attribute the photos, but yes, you're as in the clear on it as anyone who's sold a T-shirt bearing the image of a front page of a newspaper proclaiming "McGwire hits No. 62," which littered the Wal-Marts and grocery stores in my area for months afterward.

My main point is there's myriad things you could argue that makes this work "different" or "original." Someone had to take those pictures, and they were paid for their work by those newspapers. At the end of the day, their work appears in a public forum.