Law blogger Daniel Solove looks at Fairey v. AP:
Fairey’s Obama poster strikes me as sufficiently different from the photo. There is certainly a resemblance, but they are far from identical. To the extent that some elements of the photo are duplicated in the poster, it isn’t clear that Obama’s facial expression is unique enough to give the photographer the right to copyright all subsequent renderings of it. Can one, by taking a photo of a person, have copyright over all subsequent depictions of that person from that angle or with a particular expression or posture?
The Dish 