[martin__]

It would be interesting to hear why he paid royalties to get a license for the songs but not for the cover art.

Hiring artists to create retro versions of the music and hiring an artist to create a retro version of the album cover seem like pretty analogous situations.

[skywhopper]

Can't speak for him myself, but there are clear and well-established rules and the songwriting industry has a well-defined and straightforward process for paying royalties for publishing cover versions of songs. And there's no question either legally or ethically whether publishing a cover version of a song without paying a license fee is fair use of the songwriting IP.

There's no similar existing framework or precedent for photographs, and the rights involved are much less clear. There's plenty of evidence of other similarly transformative artwork based on photographs (described in the article) is considered fair use in the artistic community. I find most convincing the fact that the photograph is primarily documentation of a factual situation (Miles Davis playing trumpet), something which many other people saw, and which in and of itself is not copyrightable. Whereas the songwriting involved in creating the music for the album is entirely creative and not documentary in the slightest.

I think there are plenty of other good arguments about why his use of the photograph was Fair Use in the article.

[martin__]

Thanks for that insight.