She thought they looked familiar, Noa Osheroff did, when she stopped in for a drink at Early Mercy, a newish bar on King St. W.

In town from New York for the Hot Docs Film Festival in May, she knew a quick way to confirm. After an iPhone snapshot-and-send to her brother, Yair Osheroff, her guess seemed a good one: that the stylized portraits of world leaders lining the wall of the bar above the lengthy banquette were unauthorized copies of “Hipstory,” a series of works by Amit Shimoni, an Israeli artist Yair represented.

“It’s not like it’s a common image that people know,” Yair said recently. “It’s a unique work by an artist and he cares about it.”

Osheroff may be an ocean away in Tel Aviv but very much concerned with what’s happening here. Reviews of Early Mercy referenced Shimoni’s works as a decor feature. “The paintings of hipsterized world leaders will provide conversation fodder (and an easy way to test your date’s IQ),” went a review in Toronto Life. None of the stories mention Shimoni.

More than that, PD Lab, the design firm that worked on the interiors, credits the work on its Instagram feed to a Toronto tattoo artist named Zimmo Lu.

“People seem to like the project. That’s nice to see,” said Shimoni, who has licensed his work for use by companies all over the world. “But it’s impossible to control. That means sometimes you find it where you don’t want to.”

Initially, Osheroff was open to negotiating a deal. “We can accept it if they pay for it,” he said. But after failing to come to terms with Early Mercy on a licensing fee for continued use of Shimoni’s images, Osheroff has engaged a local lawyer and is preparing to sue.

(Several attempts by the Star to contact Early Mercy, as well as PD Lab and Lu, have gone unanswered.)

But the circumstance points to a larger issue. In the endless churn of image sharing on social media, it has become easier than ever to copy a work of art without the artist ever knowing — until they see it shared again on social media, of course. In Toronto alone, this is the second case in less than a year of an artist accusing a restaurant of copying their work.

“You can’t possibly police all the ills of the Internet and copyright law is just one of them,” says Paul Bain, a Toronto lawyer specializing in the field. He represented Kelly Mark last summer when an unauthorized copy of a neon work she made in 2006 turned up on the wall of Old School, a restaurant on Dundas St. W.

The copyright infringement suit they brought against the restaurant never made it to court — the parties settled recently, almost a year after the initial complaint — and the piece was removed and destroyed.

But its exposure appears to have done damage that can’t be undone. Old School patrons posted pictures of the knock-off regularly on Instagram, causing it to become a moderate viral sensation. T-shirts bearing the slogan Mark created for the work, “I Called Shotgun Infinity When I Was Twelve,” began appearing everywhere from Etsy to Bluenotes, the Canadian mall teenwear shop. Those two have since been removed, but at least one version continues to be sold by a Swiss website called boldomatic.

While copyright law has evolved to allow appropriation, the work needs to be considered “transformative,” Bain says, altering the original to the point where it shifts entirely in context and form. The works on the wall of Early Mercy differ from Shimoni’s, but not much: The portraits, playful portrayals of such figures as Che Guevara and Gandhi, are black and white, where Shimoni’s are colour. They’re also painted on large curving bowls, not flat surfaces.

Where a work is copied, the law is explicit: any work, whether visual or text, is subject to internationally recognized intellectual property laws, which state that the only person who can authorize copies of those works are the creator of that work or their rightful heir.

Policing it, though, is easier said than done. In the dice-roll that is Google image search, pictures can land in the strangest places. “I can be finished an illustration, upload it to one site and the same day it’s on someone’s wall in South Africa or China,” says Shimoni, citing two real-world examples. “It’s very easy for people to just take what they want.”

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Shimoni has seen his images pirated several times that he knows of, in Thailand, China and India. (A polite request to remove them has usually been enough). And bizarre stories abound, from an American family’s Christmas card photo (posted on Facebook) turning up as a billboard advertisement in the Czech Republic to a woman’s self-documentation of a personal slimming project (on Instagram) being used to promote a weight-loss product.

Once an unauthorized reproduction is discovered, a legal threat is the only recourse, though traversing borders and oceans can make it more trouble than it’s worth.

For Osheroff and Shimoni, “worth” is less a monetary issue than a matter of principle. Osheroff got in touch with Drew Downs, a Toronto retailer who licenses Shimoni’s Hipstory images to use on things like throw pillows at his shop, Nuvango, on Queen St. W.

Downs broached negotiations with Early Mercy in May on the artist’s behalf, offering their standard licensing fee of $300 (U.S.) for each of the eight images — the series has been licensed to a handful of other bars and restaurants around the world — for a total of $2,400 U.S. ($3,105 Cdn.).

In an email exchange with Downs, Early Mercy owner Albert Rishes said PD Lab had commissioned the work from Lu. In a final email to Downs, Rishes wrote: “I have come to an agreement with PDLab. Your artist will get $2400 CND not US. If you want to fight and be difficult, you will spend more in leagal (sic) fees. Take what your (sic) getting and end the buslls--- (sic).”

Downs stood firm on the standard licensing fee, and has not heard from Rishes since.

“It’s just really disappointing,” Shimoni says. “If they had just contacted us before, we would have met them with a big smile. Of course I want to share my art. But I want credit for it too.”

When is appropriation fair use?

Copyright law has evolved over the years to allow “fair use” — appropriating images from advertising, media and even other artists — so long as the resulting work is “transformative” in nature, says Paul Bain, a copyright lawyer and partner at the Toronto firm Dickinson Wright.

Consider Andy Warhol’s endless silkscreen portraits of celebrities; most of them were made by co-opting publicity handout photos. Similar works used media images of such things as a car crash or an electric chair, screened in a range of colours and repeated multiple times.

Still, appropriation remains a legally hazy area, as a recent suit brought against New York-based Richard Prince makes clear. Prince, who became famous at the height of the appropriation-art era of the 1980s by displaying close-up photographs of Marlboro cigarette ads, was sued earlier this year by Donald Graham, a photographer who claims Prince illegally used his photograph of a Rastafarian smoking a joint.

Prince displayed the image, a large-scale screen grab from Instagram, alongside several others. He maintained the original context, showing the images complete with the likes and comments they had garnered online. His defence argues fair use based on the idea that the work is not a straight borrowing of the images, but rather a critical treatment of the medium itself.

Prince, who sold the pictures for as much as $100,000 (U.S.) each, is no stranger to legal action, having been sued in 2011 by photographer Patrick Cariou after appropriating material from his book Yes, Rasta. (“Sometimes it’s better not to be successful and well-known and you can get away with much more,” Prince said at the time). A court found in his favour in 2013.