Artist Sees Pink, Wants Green

Singer Pink and her label Zomba have been sued in the SDNY for infringement by artist Vladimir Kush over alleged unauthorized use of his painting, "Contes Erotiques" in a music video for "U + Ur Hand." In the video a book opens up, revealing Pink dressed as a car mechanic. Wikipedia has a lengthy entry that tells you more than you want to know about the song and the video, here. Here is a link to the video, which begins with a toy figure of a woman, mostly nude, mounting the spine of a book and opening it up. Through the video, the book opens up and shows pictures of Pink as well as various text.

Vladmir Kush is a Russian emigre. (See his own story of himself here). Kush's painting (link here to his site to see the work) depicts a naked woman mounting a book's spine with a quill sticking through pages. Other than a rather trite metaphor, the meaning of the painting is lost on me, but then so is Pink. That said, I far prefer the painting.

In my opinion, it is extremely likely that whoever created the image of the woman that opens the video (and I would be surprised if that was Pink herself), did so after seeing Kush's work. But Kush doesn't have a copyright in the idea of a naked woman mounting the back of a book even if he was the first to come up with it (something I have no way of knowing). Moreover, after the quick initial showing of the toy woman in the video (which doesn't much look like Kush's anyway), the scenes with a book opening bear no resemblance to Kush's work.