A Stunning FLOTUS Portrait To Push You Through This Damn Election

[Ms. Toad]

35. It makes no difference whether she intends to profit from it.

Copyright grants to the original author (the photographer) the right to control reproduction of her work. It permits the author to decide if she wants her work used - for example - by a Trump supporter on a crude sign, modified to caricature FLOTUS as an ape. I hope you can understand that most photographers who take a glamorous photo of FLOTUS would not want that to happen - even though the crude sign would not be for sale or would not make any profit. The same copyright protections that may have been violated here are what allow the artist to control who copies their work, under what circumstances.

As to this instance, the photograph may be her own (no problem), she may have obtained consent (no problem), it may have been licensed generally under a license that perrmits copying and reproduction (again - no problem).

But if not, the infringement occurs when she reproduced another's work to use as the basis of her own without consent, profit or not.