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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. […]

Birthday Musings 12/19/10

Having worked freelance all my life, I understood from the outset the necessity of reinventing oneself periodically. Roughly every decade of my professional life has required radical redefinition of my work, my activities, and my skill sets. This past decade, the Oughts (or Aughts), has followed that pattern. […]