Blogging and snogging
An unlikely champion of Fair Use is emerging in the form of weirdly plastic, celebrity fluffer and blogger, Perez Hilton. Hilton's website is a tell-all blog that dishes out the dirt on celebrities. His specialty is outing believed-to-be-but-still-in-the-closet homosexuals. In the last few months, he has purportedly outed Jodie Foster, Queen Latifah and Clay Aiken as well as triggered off voluntary admissions from Lance Bass and Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser).
But that's not what is putting him in the crossfire of the IP lawyers. It's his use of paparazzi photographs that has caused him to be hit with a $7.5 million lawsuit. He is claiming, naturally enough, that the Fair Use exemption allows him to use these pics (he draws little hearts and arrows on the shots and then makes bitchy comments about them in his postings).
I don't like the fact that he doesn't clearly attribute the authorship of the pix, but I find myself strangely supportive of his right to use them. The digital world needs to have much less sharp elbows when it comes to cross-fertilization of intellectual property and if Perez is the guy to do it, then great. I realize that the paparazzi make their living out of of these shots, but hey, dung beetles do not have an exclusive right to dung. These guys sell their shots on the basis of shock and initial exclusivity, neither of which attribute is diminshed by Hilton's usage.
Posted on December 18, 2006