[chc]

On the other hand, one could easily argue that there's a greater degree of artistic and stylistic transformation in creating pixel art than there is in moving two feet to the right and snapping another photograph and hoping this one turns out better than the last one.

Heck, just look at the tie in the two versions. It would be hard to make it look that different in two photographs from anything like the same angle. Because the pixel art is an artistic representation of a tie rather than a blind copy of the photograph, the details are radically different even though it gives the same impression. It's a very artistic and skillful work.

Additionally, as a newspaper editor and sometimes judge at competitions, I often look at many different photographs from different photographers at the same event. A lot of the time, the photos are barely distinguishable — a speaker saying "think" from one angle doesn't look vastly different from a speaker saying "should" a second later from a slightly different angle — yet none of the photographers would dream of suing the others for copyright infringement, despite the fact that one took the shot first and the other shot looks WAY more similar to the first than "Kind of Bloop" does to "Kind of Blue."