[entwife]

In the US it is allowed to take photos of people and publish them, in public. Wikimedia commons has a table of laws here: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specifi...

The question is whether Afroman's use of the officers' images is for-profit, or if it can be categorized as educational or journalistic. I am in favor of the latter characterization, as I found the videos newsworthy and educational, and illustrate problems with policing that I have primarily heard about by word of mouth.

[public_defender]

> “As a result of Defendants’ actions, Plaintiffs have suffered damages, including all profits derived from and attributable to Defendants’ unauthorized use of Plaintiffs’ personas, and have suffered humiliation, ridicule, mental distress, embarrassment, and loss of reputation,” the lawsuit said.

What is super interesting to me is the damages theory, which is apparently that the cops themselves had the right to profit from their likenesses so Afroman making money damaged them.

Let's parse this out: these police personas don't have inherent value--nobody would pay for a picture of one of these people on his way to the laundromat. There is also nothing interesting about their behavior in the abstract. For example, it's not like they broke into his house and recited original poetry, which he then sold in his own poetry book. Afroman repurposed the harmful conduct of police into an artistic work. The value of their conduct to the artwork was that it was harmful to the artist. So their argument is that they were damaged when he profited from the harm they caused because they had the right to profit from that harm instead?

It's nothing more than an erotic fantasy of mine, but it is possible to sanction the lawyer who filed this pleading under FRCP 11 or whatever is the local equivalent.