Being married to a graphic designer, designs/photos are borrowed all the time and over time, working with whichever picture, it gets skewed. Which is important. From the little I understand, the image has to get reasonably skewed so as to show a new design.
While the courts on copy written material tend to be very conservative (everyone remembers The Verve's song "Symphony" that was given to the Rolling Stones and they then sold it to a corporation.) It has been getting even worse than that recently.
The truth is, the AP has been losing subscriptions from major papers like crazy in the past several years and any money coming in, even from bullshit court cases like this, is worth the effort.
