Thomas Hawke’s Digital Connection raises a very interesting and disturbing issue, and one that we have highlighted before here. It seems that Flickr, the online image-archiving company, is censoring images and content that it deems negatively critical of Obama. Most recently Flickr has removed, without prior notice to the owner, the image of Obama as the Joker.

Thomas Hawke:

[I]t’s unfortunate that Flickr would embark upon yet another act of censorship when an image was so clearly parody and fair use. What bothers me even more is that this is still another example of Flickr censoring users who are critical of President Obama and his policies. In June Flickr deleted the entire account and photostream of Flickr user Shepherd Johnson after he posted comments critical of the President on the Official White House Photostream. Now I’m actually a Democrat who voted for President Obama and am super happy to see the President using Flickr. But while Flickr’s staff is obviously proud of the fact that they have President Obama’s official photostream on Flickr, I don’t think that this fact ought to be the impetuous for them to censor and delete users who are critical of the President.

I’m also troubled by this censorship in light of the clear pro-Obama bias that Flickr’s staff has shown. If you do a search for the word “Obama” on the flickr blog you get 74 different results, many of them very positive. By contrast a search for “Bush” on the Flickr blog only pulls up 5 results (even though Flickr has existed much longer under President Bush’s presidency than President Obama’s).

It should be apparent that this is one way in which law, specifically copyright law, can be used as a censoring mechanism. What is not immediately apparent is whether or not the Obama administration has its hand in this.

According to the Art Newspaper, a “cache of Frida Kahlo oil paintings, diaries and archival material that is the subject of a book to be published by Princeton Architectural Press on November 1st has been denounced by scholars as a cache of fakes.”

“In my view the publishers have been the victims of a gigantic hoax,” says New York-based Latin American art dealer Mary-Anne Martin, who has bought and sold numerous works by Kahlo.

German police believe they have smashed a worldwide ring suspected of selling forged artworks worth millions of dollars with the arrests of three people. Police said they seized over 1,000 fake Alberto Giacometti bronzes and sculptures in the swoop.

First, the federal government fails to obtain the copyright to Frank Gaylord’s Korean War Veterans Memorial, and now Washington State decides to alter the form and aesthetic effects of a World War II Memorial.

Olympia artist Simon Kogan has been in a 2-year dispute with Washington State’s Department of General Administration. According to Kogan, overaggressive cleaning in May 2007 damaged his World War Two Memorial on the Capitol campus and robbed it of its most powerful feature.

Kogan maintains the powerwashing damaged the blades, wheat field and tiles. He said the cleaning destroyed the patina that gave color, form and contrast to the “ghosts” that framed the etched names on the blades. Kogan used chemicals to create this effect as an “invitation from faraway” for passers-by. He explained approaching visitors would then see and touch the names, establishing a connection between the living and war dead.

He has demanded that the state agency fix the damage or he will sue the state agency in federal court for violation of the Visual Artists Rights Act, breach of contract and copyright infringement.

More from The Olympian here.

The official poster for the 2009 NORML Conference, designed by artist Sonia Sanchez.

According to today’s Washington Post, the image above incorporates a photograph of Mr. Obama during his Occidental College years. That’s not the problem. The problem lies with “the photographer. Lisa Jack, an Obama classmate at Occidental College, [who] snapped the image in 1980, one in a series of photos that never saw the light of day until she debuted them in Time’s 2008 Person of the Year issue. She had no idea her photo had been appropriated by NORML,” a nonprofit lobbying organization working to legalize marijuana.

NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre admits that the poster artist, Sonia Sanches, used the original photo image without permission, and of also selling posters of the image. St. Pierre argues that “our lawyers thought it was adulterated enough to comply with the fair use laws.” We hope they weren’t stoned.

According to the Post, Jack has already called the lawyers for Getty Images, which oversees her photo’s copyright.

UPDATE: August 18, 2008

The Obama/Joker poster artist has come forward.

Rocco DeSimone, a former art dealer accused of defrauding investors out of millions of dollars, stands trial next month in federal court in Rhode Island. DeSimone was convicted in 2005 of evading taxes and then escaped from a minimum security federal prison before surrendering.

Of particular import this past week was a mention by the UK’s Telegraph and Washington Post of the Obama/Joker Socialist poster, and to the best of our knowledge, the complete lack of coverage of it by the NY Times (the newspaper that brings us “All the News That’s Fit to Print”). The LA Times has their version of this poster, but sadly verges on the anectdotal and subjective.

The illogical conclusions by the Post’s Philip Kennicott should more than raise concerns. One doesn’t have to be a liberal or conservative to notice how quickly free speech is pummeled by cries of racism at the sight of criticism one doesn’t like. What one should fear is the quiet and subtle censoring of criticism against a head-of-state that happens to be black. The erasure of criticism — good, bad, sensitive, and yes, even racist, is what the First Amendment guards against. What’s more disconcerting is that the Post’s lazy analysis of this image is indicative of the ongoing pro-Obama cadres of “cultural analysts” self-proclaimed as well-versed in semiotics and post-modernist theory.

The smartest and most logical analysis comes from Eugene Volokh of the Huffington Post, “Joker = “urban” = “inner city” = black. True, he’s white, Heath Ledger is white, but … But what exactly? All references to white “urban” criminals are actually secretly to blacks?”

Clancco would love to hear from the “anonymous” Obama-Joker poster creator(s). If you’re out there, you can contact us here, same bat-website, same bat-email!