Paint by Numbers

Lawyers are preparing to defend former street artist and political graphics wunderkind Shepard Fairey against charges that he used a photograph without properly licensing the image to create the iconic Obama "Hope" portrait that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

Digital rights advocate and Stanford law professor Larry Lessig is circulating a web page called "Crowd-sourcing a "fair use" case" to encourage readers to donate examples of Obama images to dispute the originality of the pose that is so essential for claiming what Benjamin described as the "aura" in a traditional original work of art.