Chris Clanton runs an eponymous blog, chrisclanton.com. Clanton, an American, now resides in Fayetteville, AR. But back in spring 2007 he was living in JiuJiang City in Jiangxi Province of China, “teaching English at a technical college for finance and economics.”
At that time he ran afoul of Los Angeles gallerist Paul Kopeikin, with whom I’ve had my own prolonged debacle. Clanton thereupon Googled Kopeikin’s name, found my posted material tracking Kopeikin’s 2001 violation of my copyright and the copyright of three dozen other authors, and contacted me to describe his own situation. I responded at some length, twice, in the process not only explicating copyright law and the “fair use” exception thereto but also (alas) coming down squarely on the side of Kopeikin and a photographer he represented at the time, one Jill Greenberg, in the case Clanton outlined.
Click here for Clanton’s exchange with Kopeikin regarding permission to post a thumbnail of one of Greenberg’s images in a review. Click here for my subsequent exchange with Clanton on this subject. Read all the way to the bottom of that page for the full exchange.
— A. D. Coleman
© Copyright 2009 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. By permission of the author and Image/World Syndication Services, imageworld AT nearbycafe DOT com.
I find Mr Kopeikin’s vocabulary rather limited and his bedside manners (sorry, not bedside, bathroom) rather lacking. ;o)
BC
Those interested in the hijinks of the irrepressible Paul Kopeikin, as exemplified in his email to Chris Clanton that led off this post, will enjoy his various even-tempered and illuminating comments as posted in Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection, which just came to my attention.
Hawk had the temerity to make an unequivocal moral judgment about photographer Jill Greenberg’s images of crying naked children, in a review of her 2006 solo show at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery in LA. Hawk forthrightly titled his review “JILL GREENBERG IS A SICK WOMAN WHO SHOULD BE ARRESTED AND CHARGED WITH CHILD ABUSE.” This evoked a response from Kopeikin, resulting in a thread concerning both Greenberg’s work and Kopeikin’s defense thereof.
For a no less caustic but more elegantly argued critique of Greenberg’s work and Kopeikin’s profitable role in promulgating and marketing it, see Jeremiah McNichols’s two-part commentary at his regrettably inactive but still-online blog, Think In Pictures. McNichols’s critique (prompted by Hawk’s review and Kopeikin’s reaction) comes in two parts: a sober, detailed analysis, “The Case Against Jill Greenberg’s “‘End Times,'” and an accompanying, Swiftian “Modest Proposal”-style satire, “An Open Letter to Paul Kopeikin,” suggesting ways in which Kopeikin, Greenberg, and McNichols could partner to build on her concept for further profit. For good measure McNichols also provides “Welcome To The Internet, Paul Kopeikin! Here Are A Few Things You Should Know,” offering the web-challenged gallerist some pointers on ‘netiquette and such.
I haven’t seen Greenberg’s work “in the flesh,” so to speak, and thus have formed no opinion about it yet, so I reserve comment. Based on the digital versions posted at the gallery, I have to say that I find the photographer’s and gallerist’s argument that they somehow constitute a critique of the religious right, the Bush administration, the GOP in general, and the war in Iraq absolutely preposterous and self-serving. (You’ll find these in the accompanying press release at the site; click on the “About” link on this page.) Clearly written by someone other than Kopeikin himself, as it lacks any trace of his signature literary style.
What jumps out at me from this entire exchange is the pervasive subjectivism in so many amateur writers and blogger. Even after Mr. Coleman patiently explained the law, the context of his opinion and his status in rendering such an opinion, everyone seems to believe that their opinion carries just as much weight — even if it is ill informed and factually incorrect.
I see this almost daily in my college classes. Students have little regard and no respect for intellectual property and believe that if they can copy and paste it or download it, it’s fair game.
I wonder how these same people will feel some day when they have actually created something that is of value to them. Will they ever realize that what you create with your mind is no less valuable than what you create with you hands and tools?
We have created an idea based society with a capitalistic economy where most of the workers have come to believe that their work should be donated to anyone who wants it. It is utopia or just a lack of hunger?
I appreciate Thom Harrop’s thoughtful analysis of the underlying assumptions in this exchange. Let me take it a step or two further.
Without question, digital technology has created — as an unintended side effect — a culture of entitlement in which many people have come to feel that if something gets made accessible to them (such as a picture or text posted on a website) and they want it for their own use, they have the right to take it. That attitude doesn’t restrict its infectious capacity to teenagers downloading mp3 files. To my consternation, I’ve discovered that I have colleagues who, as professional writers, have persuaded themselves that they’re entitled to use copyrighted works by artists to illustrate their own books without permission or payment of fees. This represents the mentality of the shoplifter.
We have extensive discussion of this phenomenon in books and periodicals and on the web. At one extreme of the conversation we have the people who proclaim (mindlessly, in my opinion) that “Information wants to be free.” At the other end you have people (like me) who believe that information no more “wants to be free” than does cat food, and that we are nearing or have reached “the end of free” on the web and in digitech generally.
Some of those who take the “info wants to be free” position at least put their money where their mouth is by publishing their work within the Creative Commons context. I respect that, as a principled position. Indeed, because it’s principled I’ve considered it seriously myself. And I’ve rejected it, for practical reasons.
The plain fact is, I can’t afford to give away any more of my work than I already do (via this blog and other outlets). I’ve been self-employed since 1967. I make a substantial percentage of my annual revenue from licensing rights (including reprint rights and web rights) to my essays. And while I’m glad on one level for those of my colleagues who have trust funds or tenured academic positions or staff-writer jobs and can afford to sign away their rights, as an independent producer of IP I have to view them much as your neighborhood cobbler would look at someone who started repairing shoes for free right down the street.
Beyond this matter of free/not free, there’s a bigger issue that Harrop raises in his role as an educator: the disregard of his students for IP rights and their general unawareness of the laws that protect IP and/or protect free speech and public dialogue, the complex balancing act involved there, and the rationales behind the various laws and judicial decisions on these matters. The copyright law isn’t particularly murky or impenetrable; neither is the “fair use” exception. I also find among students a lack of understanding of the difference between plagiarism (putting your own name on someone else’s work) and quotation without attribution, among other matters.
When Harrop and I and other of my readers grew up in the mid-century U.S., the technology that would enable easy violation of copyright and piracy of IP had just begun to emerge: the photocopy machine, the home tape recorder. No one felt a need to teach the general student population about IP rights; aside from retyping an encyclopedia entry or someone else’s term paper and presenting it as your own, the average student didn’t have much chance to appropriate anyone else’s work. If and when one got to college, one received some instruction in a freshman English class on the obligation of citation of sources and footnoting, perhaps with a caution about plagiarism. And that sufficed, at the time.
It no longer does. Most colleges and universities have developed strong policy statements regarding plagiarism; many use software to detect it. Most also have initiated stringent restrictions on unauthorized distribution of photocopies. They publish these in their student and faculty guidelines — which everyone reads closely, of course. (Didn’t you?)
That’s all very well and good. But it’s hardly sufficient, as Harrop’s experience verifies. The technology enabling plagiarism and IP piracy has spread just about everywhere, and it’s simple enough that even a child can operate it. So I think the time has come to start teaching these matters, as part of the curriculum. I believe the basics of copyright and IP and plagiarism and “fair use” can be taught effectively at the high-school level, perhaps even earlier. I also believe that, in an “information society” in a “information age,” this isn’t an option — it’s a necessity.
My department at the college actually teaches IP rights in two classes now. It seems to be an uphill battle. Students believe that anyone who is photographing the same subject matter as they have is plagiarizing their work, yet if they want to use another person’s work in a montage or collage, they don’t see why they can’t. The art community in general has contributed to this by calling all such art ‘appropriated’ work. With apologies to those in the modern art world, when you take someone’s work and reuse it without paying them, or at least getting written permission, that is copyright infringement. From hip hop music to fine art galleries to the web, we have become a nation of people who no longer seem to respect the creative work of anyone else.
We have seen the toll this has taken on newspapers. Will all of them have to shut their doors before people accept that they have to make money to keep providing their necessary service? Once all the newspapers are gone, who will track down the next Watergate or Iran-Contra story?
America no longer makes anything. Our largest products are in the realm of IP. Once people decided they no longer have to pay for that, what are people in this country going to live on?
Can you post a syllabus excerpt or description of the class or classes in which your department teaches IP rights? Could prove helpful for others who want to introduce that subject into their courses. (I’d teach this by holding mock trials in the classroom. The U.S. Supreme Court decision concerning the parody by 2 Live Crew of the Roy Orbison song “Oh, Pretty Woman could become great classroom theater.)
I find it surprising that pomo “appropriation” has not touched off a flood of litigation. The art world may have endorsed “appropriation,” but the courts have often looked askance at it; see the Art Rogers vs. Jeff Koons case. As in the “Cat in the Hat”/O. J. Simpson case, to which I referred in my original exchange with Chris Clanton, the courts have clearly and repeatedly ruled that the new work must comment on the appropriated material to qualify as parody and therefore enjoy the protection of the “fair use” exception.
And while I agree with many of your points, I have to qualify your comment about hip hop music. In response to the practice of “sampling” — the isolation and recontextualization of brief excerpts from existing recordings, incorporated into new recordings — the music industry actually created a smart, functional business model enabling those who wanted to sample to license rights to those fragments from the rights holders. This solution demonstrates that it is indeed possible to balance the creative community’s legitimate desire to comment or otherwise build on existing works against the right of artists to get paid for the use of their work. It enables creative reinterpretation without disenfranchising the makers of original IP.
Precisely because hip hop music is familiar to today’s students, this example might carry particular weight with them.