No juicy developments to report on sorry, but thank you for all your comments and a lively and informative conversation. I can't possibly reply to all, but I'll do my best to cover all major issues you brought up.
Reading your comments, I'm convinced now even more that this issue is very unique in terms of legalities. Valid points could be made by both sides, but I think only a in a court of law can it really be clarified. I don't even know what to call it, so you're right ... I shouldn't be using terms I can't prove are correct.
All I know is this: I see a drawing which I made, copied and displayed as somebody else's art. It's not a small part of a painting ... it makes up the whole painting! Does it matter how he copied it? How large it is? He painstakingly recreated it dot by dot. It's not easy to "just get over it" so excuse me for expressing my displeasure. If this issue can simply be boiled down to an uninformed illustrator's whining, I doubt it would have crated such a long debate.
I have nothing to gain from this. I'm merely exposing the practice.
About the process I use to make my art:
Of course my drawings are based on photos! What is the point of even bringing this up? I make spot illustrations not fine art. My assignment is to create a close likeness of a subject based on a photo using a specific pointillist technique for an article in a daily newspaper. I am creating a completely unique piece of art and you could never mistaken it for a photo it's based on. And yes, of course the Journal has permissions for these photos. It's childish to even question that!
In any case, a commentator by the name of XenonOfActicus summed it up very eloquently (much better than I can) and it reflects exactly how I feel about this:
"Yes, your WSJ stipple work was a translation of an existing image (photo) into a new medium. The difference here is that you:
(presumably) had permission from the copyright-owner to use that image
made some substantial transformative visual changes to the image.
Whereas Jose:
Did not (presumably) have permission from the copyright owner (WSJ) or Noli (the artist) to use the image.
Despite changing the medium into a more difficult one (wax) did not contribute any transformative change.
In addition, by not providing any credit to the original artist, Jose implicitly allows viewers to think he may be the artist responsible for the stipple stylization.
Don't let criticism from dorks get you down. Even if you weren't the photographer, even if you don't own the copyright to your work-for-hire for the WSJ, your intellectual property rights are being disresepcted and should be honored properly.
For those who would cite Warhol and Campbells, one could argue that nobody could have mistakenly assumed Warhol designed the soup can. That is not the case here. Clearly a number of people have been mistaken that Jose was the artist behind the stipple-style transformation."
Thanks Xenon! ;-)
If you want to know more about hedcuts, how they're done, what's involved, how it started and evolved throughout the years, or just to ask any question, you can join our hedcut forum at http://sec.online.wsj.com/community/groups/wsj-stippledot-drawingshedcuts-571/topics/.
How different are they?
UPDATE 2: http://hedcuts.blogspot.com/2009/10/hot-wax-remix.html
UPDATE 3: http://hedcuts.blogspot.com/2009/10/from-boo-hoo-to-brouhaha.html