MoMA R&D
Salon 11 Unfair/Fair - Copyrights and Us
Unfair/Fair: Copyrights and Us explores copyrights and fair use. The idea of copyright is centuries old, but the emergence of new media technologies and the globalization of information have radically altered access to and control of art, literature, music, and concepts. As a result, borrowing, remixing, sampling, imitating, and appropriating have become increasingly integral strategies to contemporary practice, artistic and not. The implications for the notion of authenticity and issues of attribution, and the ramifications concerning copyright laws, however, remain in flux.
Watch the videos from the salon and explore some of these questions: Who and what are copyrights there to protect? Do the digital and the analog worlds follow the same rules? Is the refrain “no copyright infringement intended” an abdication of responsibility or an act of civil disobedience? What qualifies as fair use? These and many other questions will be central to our discussion.
The salon took place on November 18th, 2014.
Speakers
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Pippa Loengard
Pippa Loengard is Deputy Director and Lecturer in Law, Kernochan Center, Columbia Law School. Pippa’s interest in intellectual property issues stemmed from her earlier work in documentary film production. Her legal research focuses on issues surrounding the visual arts and the entertainment industries, with a particular accent on issues of taxation as they pertain to the arts and the rights of authors and creators.
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Nancy Adelson
Nancy Adelson is Deputy General Counsel, The Museum of Modern Art. Before joining MoMA in 1998, Nancy worked with Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (VLA), a legal aid organization that provides free legal assistance and information to low-income artists. Nancy counseled artist-clients, taught legal clinics, and lectured on legal issues of concern to the arts community.
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Fred Benenson
Fred Benenson is a Kickstarter Fellow and emoji translation expert. With the support of Kickstarter fundraising, Fred published Emoji Dick, an emoji translation of Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick, which in 2013 became the first emoji book acquired by The Library of Congress. He is also the author of How to Speak Emoji. Founder of Free Culture @ NYU and a former Creative Commons representative, he occasionally teaches copyrights and cyberlaw at NYU.
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Artie Vierkant
Artie Vierkant is a post-internet artist. Artie’s work concerns the role of image production and dissemination in contemporary networked society. His ongoing work Image Objects explores issues of materiality and the reification of digital entities. Artie’s latest work, Exploits, is an exploration of intellectual property and how issues of authorship and ownership have changed since the transition to a digital society.
Reading Resources
Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi Copyright, Permissions, and Fair Use among Visual Artists and the Academic and Museum Visual Arts Communities (2014)
David Bollier VIRAL SPIRAL: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (2008)
William M. Borchard A Trademark is Not a Copyright or a Patent (2014)
Nicolas Bourriard Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World (2012)
Cory Doctorow Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free (2014)
Joi Ito Freesouls (2008)
Randy Kennedy Apropos Appropriation The New York Times (2011)
Lawrence Lessig Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (2004)
Louis Menand Crooner in Rights Spat: Are Copyright laws too strict? The New Yorker (2014)
Peter Baldwin The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle (2014)
Seth Price Dispersion (2008)
Aaron Swartz Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (2011)