why isn't this publishing

Copying has been around for years. People may not always call it that, and say things like, mimic, cartoon, clone, depict, ditto, draw, engrave, fake, imitate, forge, knock off, mirror, paraphrase, portray, reflect, repeat, replicate, represent, reproduce, rewrite… the list goes on.
I do believe that it is the artistic expression and the individuals’ craft that makes it their own. But sometimes you can abuse your privileges. I see both sides of the coin as to how taking Shepard Fairey’s case for example and how his “Hope” poster became such a legal issue. I feel you can get away with fair use if it stays small and is for commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching or scholarship. But clearly, when his poster went “big” and started selling, he stepped out of those confines. And to top it off, he destroyed evidence? It is obvious who is at fault here and I think Fairey went too far and abused the Fair Use Policy.

I found a website that goes into further detail about Intellectual Property in the digital age and I feel it had some good points:
The widespread use of computer networks and the global reach of the World Wide Web have added substantially to the information sector's production of an astonishing abundance of information in digital form, as well as offering unprecedented ease of access to it. Creating, publishing, distributing, using, and reusing information have become many times easier and faster in the past decade. The good news is the enrichment that this explosive growth in information brings to society as a whole. The bad news is the enrichment that it can also bring to those who take advantage of the properties of digital information and the Web to copy, distribute, and use information illegally. The Web is an information resource of extraordinary size and depth, yet it is also an information reproduction and dissemination facility of great reach and capability; it is at once one of the world's largest libraries and surely the world's largest copying machine. More can be found at http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9601&page=98

One thing that I was always taught while writing research papers was to cite where your information came from. Should this not be the same with Intellectual Property? You can take full credit for your work, but if you took half of it from someone else, or had some obvious, direct influence from a previous work, why not give them the credit they deserve? Just because everyone has started to “borrow ideas” and “get inspiration” from previous existing things does not make it right to just say it is at least 99 percent authentically yours.