that's the billion dollar question. I think any reasonable person would say that the image was literally transformed from a throw away celeb press pic of a long shot presidential candidate with george clooney or whatever into an iconic work of art - that photo never would have been seen again were it not for Fairey's poster.
but a reasonably greedy company trying to assert its intellectual property rights would say cry foul and grab for whatever it could get. I'm guessing it never occurred to AP that Fairey gave away the rights to the image, and didn't personally profit from it, ergo, there's nothing tangible to recover, but hey - we can still give a smack down to millions of artists out there.
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