A legal victory for 'appropriation art' expands when artists can remix each others' work

Does painting blots over the eyes of a photograph turn it into something new? That's one of the questions that a US district court was asked to consider last week, leading to a surprising decision about when artists can use copyrighted work. The issue was whether "appropriation artist" Richard Prince was fairly repurposing images from Yes Rasta, a 2000 book documenting photographer Patrick Cariou's time with Rastafarians in Jamaica. While a previous court case found that his work was copyright i...