“Florian Freier loves Gursky. He could never afford one. So he recreated one of the master’s most famous works, Bahrain I, which depicts a racetrack and looks like an abstract painting, using only Photoshop and Google Earth.” (via Using Google Earth to Recreate a $1,000,000 Masterpiece, for About $0 | Fast Company)
So wait, hold on. The copyright issue here is interesting, to say the least. Let’s apply US law, ignoring that all of these people probably live somewhere else. Does someone hold copyright on satellite images? Why is it possible to hold copyright on satellite images? They’re a mechanistic reproduction of an uncopyrightable subject (i.e. the planet), which I thought shouldn’t generate a copyright.
And doesn’t this final image still violate Gursky’s copyright? I don’t see that it matters whether the copy occurs because you stole his image or flew out there and took a new, identical, photo yourself or put it on the Xerox; the point here is to exactly reproduce the artistic decisions that Gursky made while capturing the photo, which is why the photograph is copyrightable. You still just made an almost exact copy. Why does it matter how you made it?
But I’m not a lawyer. Maybe you are?
(Source: flachware.de)
