The Guardian reports on the perils of not doing much to alter the images you appropriate. A federal judge in New York has found that lucrative American artist Richard Prince must destroy works he made from barely modified photographs that he took from a book by French photographer Patrick Cariou, and that Prince had in some cases already sold or exchanged in megabucks deals. New York federal court judge Deborah Batts ruled that Prince’s work – a grid of photographs of rastafarians to which he added, for example, a guitar or merely splotches on their faces – breached copyright because they used images from Cariou’s 2000 book Yes, Rasta, “in their entirety, or nearly so.”

You got to doctor em up!