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Copyright & Follow-up Rights

In selling a work of visual art — a painting, a sculpture, a photographic print — the artist doesn’t commonly sell the IP rights thereto. The artist gets to benefit for decades from the licensing of all IP rights to the work, as do his heirs and assigns. Presumably the artists cheering on the follow-up rights campaign don’t intend to give any share of that income to collectors of their works. But shouldn’t that be part of any droit de suite deal? […]

Dog Days (1): News & Notes

I’m envisioning a performance piece for TverCA, the “new contemporary art centre” in Russia, to commemorate that phase of the infamous Katyn Massacre perpetrated therein April 1940. For ten hours at a stretch, with the occasional break, the performer places a cantaloupe on a shelf attached to the log wall, puts the barrel of the pistol against it, and fires a single shot — maintaining NKVD executioner Vasili Mikhailovich Blokhin’s implacable pace of one every 3 minutes. Bottles of vodka are passed around at the end of each session, as was Blokhin’s custom. […]

Night of the Living Infringers

The IP thieves and copyright infringers are out in force, multiplying like rabbits. And, like all good zombies, they want to eat you — with a special hankering for your brains. I’d advise that educators should exercise wariness in using their sites as teaching resources; the enabling of serial infringers isn’t much different from doing the infringing yourself, and most schools have stringent prohibitions against the use of pirated materials in the classroom. […]

Copyright for All Primates?

These images became public-domain material the moment the macaque generated them. Caters licensed the rights to exclusive use of them from Slater, but then faced a conundrum: How could they exercise those rights? Only by maintaining strict control over their availability. (For example, if they’d licensed reproduction rights to a T-shirt manufacturer.) As soon as the agency released digital files of the images for distribution via an online publication, the Daily Mail, their public-domain status became activated, so to speak. […]

David W. Streets . . . He’s Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!

The triumphant return of David W. Streets to the limelight does not bear on the Norsigian-Adams contretemps, but on a brand-new situation: the 1980 garage-sale purchase by one Anton Fury of anonymous negatives of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. Streets has, so far, behaved in a more circumspect manner than he did with the arguable “Ansel Adams” negatives. Instead of proposing authorship or pretending to other expertise, as he did with the Norsigian material, Streets is . . . crowdsourcing. […]