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On Wednesday night, I was scrolling through my RSS reader and checking out some articles of interest when I came across this post on ReadWriteWeb where Sarah Perez discussed a copyright infringement issue on photo sharing site Flickr. The issue at hand was a “Jokerized” photo of President Obama – “Jokerized” meaning made to look like “The Joker” in “The Dark Knight” flick – being pulled off the service for copyright concerns, namely that the familiar TIME magazine cover layout was built around the photo. Now I’m certainly not going to argue that particular issue here, but a main point in Perez’ article was whether this “transformative” photograph / artwork was something that would make it past a legal review. What happened next is the fun part.

As I continued reading the article – I typically read my posts in RSS if full feeds are available and click through to comment or read comments – I found a fascinating advertisement that took me to a poll on NewsMax.com, a well-known news organization typically identified as being on the conservative side of the political spectrum. The ad, as you’ll see below, might be considered a “parodied” look at Barack Obama with a medical cap on, with the link taking you to a poll focused on his health care policies.

So while we’re here, I think it begs us to ask the question as to whether this item (transformative or derivative – you decide!) would pass the same legal “test” as the “Jokerized” image.

I won’t recap or re-cover all the things that a lot of people have already done over the last few weeks since writing last, but I wanted to say a couple things about this year’s presidential election. Just a few years ago, we were talking about how Howard Dean had harnessed technology / the Internet in order to cause the stir that he had during the 2004 election season (or had the Internet “invented” Dean, as Wired’s Gary Wolf wrote at the time), and this time around we’ve elected a president that not only took in scores of dollars via the Internet, but has used a number of our favorite multimedia sites to keep us all in the loop since winning.

I’m not only psyched about what might be coming next, as someone who supported Obama, but digging how we’ll be “discussing” politics going forward. Irrelevant of your party affiliation, you’ve gotta admit it’s pretty cool when the president-elect is embedding his acceptance speech on ustream.tv:

Live TV : Ustream

 
Or how one of my favorite bloggers / podcasters, Jay Smooth made his one last motivational push on his illdoctrine.com podcast:

 
Change.gov is being regularly used to get updates from the transitioning party (though we could use some more two-way tools, IMHO), and we’re hearing talk of a more technologically-able White House, come January. The point of it all is that just like a lot of people follow celebrity news, technology folk will have their own batch of things to pay attention to, such as what’s being used in the Oval Office now, and so on.

This is the end of your political discussion for the moment.

Remember the “Wassup” ad campaign from ‘99-’02 that Budweiser had been running, featuring (and created by) Charles Stone III? Well, the guys are back, and making a statement about our country, the economy, and even the planet while sharing their support for Barack Obama. Props to Todd Defren for posting about it earlier (proving that Twitter is crazy amazing, yet again). Check the spot below, put together through the 60frames crew and the original cast.

 
The vid is only showing 336 views as of right this exact second, but I expect that’ll change. What do you think about the spot?

[update] As of about 11am Eastern on Saturday morning, the video has about 358K views to date – that’s quite a bit, but I’m definitely surprised that it’s not more. Let’s see what the weekend holds for it.

Okay, I’m officially voting this the funniest thing that’s been done this week so far – during a live interview, John Stewart asked Barack Obama, flat out, if he planned to “pull a bait and switch and enslave the white race” on the Daily Show.

As I’m having lots of trouble with the official Daily Show clips of parts 1 and 2 of this interview, I present you with the YouTube version.

Thanks to David Chartier for mentioning this on Twitter earlier today.

Aside from the fact that Hillary Clinton effectively says that it’s either she or John McCain that are actually qualified to take the White House, I thought it amusing (not really) that she brought Barack Obama’s entire campaign down to “one speech he gave in 2002.” Glad to see you were so cordial when you were sitting next to him. I guess this is what it looks like when you’re getting womped on.

In any case, a situation like this makes things look worse and worse when there’s a debate after a debate after a debate. Nothing new comes to bear, and we’re all just like “didn’t we just do this three days ago?” Wish her luck in Texas and Ohio, and even then it’s not over one way or another, nor is it a “comeback” one way or another. It’s still an uphill climb, no matter how you cut it, IMHO.

I can’t decide if it’s good or bad that I’ve been sent the link to “Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle” (just click on it…) like a dozen times or not.