MoMA R&D
Salon 38 IP
Introduction: Paola Antonelli
Priti Krishtel
Marion Nestle
Danielle Belton
Laura Anderson Barbata
Marci Shore
Q&A
Video Contribution: Dapper Dan
Video Contribution: James Boyle
Video Contribution: John Oswald
Who owns culture? Language, history, and cultural heritage may be the victims of erasure or foreign appropriation, or may be used as rationale for invasion and war. Some claim that cultural evolution has always been the product of someone else’s work. Pablo Picasso is credited with quipping that “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.” How does this sound in the age of IP, and further, repatriation, reparations, and restitution?When it comes to intellectual property, we know the adage: we should protect it to compel investment in R&D and spur innovation. We also know, however, that it can have the opposite effect, entrenching the power of few companies and limiting progress.
Some questions we pose in this salon include: What does it mean to protect intangible property? Can culture be property? Whose? How has the definition of property transformed, especially in relation to technology? What is acquisition? What is appropriation? Can a country still own another? How does the meaning change when an object, piece of land, or idea are offered instead of taken? What is the difference between creative exchange and creative theft? What are the limits of cultural preservation, and when does it become cultural oppression? Is all property worth protecting? When does an individual inventor, company, or group’s right to that protection infringe upon the public good?
This salon took place on April 11, 2022
The live stream omits the following credit from James Boyle’s contribution: All art taken from: Theft! A History of Music by James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins, and Keith Aoki, http://web.law.duke.edu/musiccomic/
Speakers
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Laura Anderson Barbata
Laura Anderson Barbata is an artist born in Mexico who works between New York City and Mexico City. Barbata’s work is focused on participatory art projects that document communities and traditions, using art forms as platforms for social change, contemporary performance, and group participation. Among them is her ongoing project The Repatriation of Julia Pastrana, begun in 2005, which resulted in the removal of Pastrana’s body from the Schreiner Collection in Oslo and its successful repatriation and burial in Sinaloa, Mexico, Pastrana’s birth state.
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Danielle Belton
Danielle Belton is a journalist and the editor in chief of HuffPost. She is the former editor-in-chief of The Root, a position she held from 2017 to 2021. Belton has written and edited for publications including theGrio, Essence, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. She also created the award-winning blog The Black Snob. Before joining The Root, Belton was editor-at-large for black women’s news site Clutch Magazine Online, and was the first black woman to lead a writer’s room in late night as the head writer for BET Networks’ NAACP Image Award-nominated talk show, “Don’t Sleep”.
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Priti Krishtel
Priti Krishtel is a health justice lawyer and co-founder of the Initiative for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge (I-MAK), a nonprofit organization that challenges systemic injustice and advocates for health equity in drug development and access. For two decades, Krishtel’s work has exposed structural inequalities in vaccine and medical access in the United States, and across the globe. Most recently, this included advocating for equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines across the globe, as well as ensuring that the Biden-Harris administration is prioritizing equity in the Patent and Trademark Office.
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Marion Nestle
Marion Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, which she chaired from 1988-2003 and from which she officially retired in September 2017. Her research and writing examine scientific and socioeconomic influences on food choice and its consequences, emphasizing the role of food industry marketing. She is the author, co-author, or co-editor of fourteen books, most notably Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health (2002).
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Marci Shore
Marci Shore is an associate professor of modern European intellectual and cultural history at Yale University. Her research focuses on the intellectual history of twentieth and twenty-first century Central and Eastern Europe. Shore is the author of three books, among them The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution (2017), where she explores the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution and subsequent war in Donbas through the lens of interviews and first-hand accounts with participants.
Video Contributors
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Dapper Dan
Dapper Dan is a Harlem couturier known as the “king of knock-offs.” He made his name in the late ’80s and ’90s as the tailor who provided rap culture with its signature style, reworking traditional luxury-house products to outfit a slew of emerging hip-hop stars, athletes and gamblers. His work was included in the MoMA exhibition ITEMS: Is Fashion Modern? In 2017.
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James Boyle
James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. He was one of the founding board members of Creative Commons, which works to facilitate the free availability of art, scholarship, and cultural materials by developing innovative, machine-readable licenses that individuals and institutions can attach to their work.
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John Oswald
John Oswald is a composer, saxophonist, and media artist from Canada. In the 1980’s he pioneered a genre of music which he titled “Plunderphonics,” that’s defined by the practice of making new music out of previously existing recordings. Oswald is the research director for Toronto’s Mystery Laboratory experimental studio, and NorthAmerican Experience’s music director. He has produced a number of recordings and has his own releases on the Swell and Musicworks labels, among others.
Reading Resources
WHAT IS FAIR USE?
Aaron Swartz Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, (2011)
Antonelli, Paola. @ at MoMA. Inside/Out, (3.10.2010)
Aoki, Keith, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins, Ian Akin, Brian Garvey, and Balfour Smith. Theft!: A History of Music. Tales from the Public Domain Durham, North Carolina: Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain, (2017)
Aufderheide, Patricia, and Peter Jaszi. Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright. Second edition. Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, (2018)
Baldwin, Peter. The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle. Princeton University Press, (2014)
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Vats, Anjali. The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans, (Introduction). Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, (2020)
FROM AND ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS
Anderson Barbata, Laura. The Eye of the Beholder: Julia Pastrana’s Long Journey Home. Seattle: Lucia|Marquand, (2017)
Belton, Danielle. Being ‘The Black Snob’ Was a Joke, Until the Day I Actually Became One. The Root, (04.25.2019)
———. Kendrick Lamar Gets His Pulitzer, but It’s Pulitzer Administrator Dana Canedy Who Is a Prize. The Root, (05.31.2018)
———. Getting to the Root with Danielle Belton. Getting to the Root | CUNY TV, (01.12.2018)
———. Woman Thought Leader: Danielle Belton. To The Contrary. PBS, (07.03.2020)
The Editorial Board, Save America’s Patent System, The New York Times, (04.16.2022)
Krishtel, Priti. The Path to Racial Justice Runs Through This Agency. The New York Times, (02.09.2021)
———. Why Are Drug Prices So High? Investigating the Outdated US Patent System. TEDTalk, (12.2019)
Krishtel, Priti, and Chelsea Clinton. Big Lie behind Who Gets to Make COVID Vaccines Won’t Protect Us.. USAToday, (12.16.2021)
Nestle, Marion. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Rev. and Expanded ed. California Studies in Food and Culture, v. 3. Berkeley: University of California Press, (2007)
Shore, Marci. The Bard of Eastern Ukraine, Where Things Are Falling Apart. The New Yorker, (11.18.2016)
———. Ukrainian Corruption Is Trump’s Native Language. Foreign Policy, (10.12.2019)
———. The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, (2018)
———. The Price of Freedom. Eurozine, (09.29.2020)
PROTECTING PHARMA IP VS. PROTECTING THE WORLD FROM PHARMA
Corkery, Michael, and Jim Wilson. Oakland Cannabis Sellers, Once Full of Hope, Face a Harsh Reality. The New York Times, (03.15.2022)
Kaplan, Thomas, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and Rebecca Robbins. Taking ‘Extraordinary Measures,’ Biden Backs Suspending Patents on Vaccines. The New York Times, (05.05.2021)
Labate, Beatriz Caiuby. Honoring the Indigenous Roots of the Psychedelic Movement. Harvard Divinity School | Center for the Study of World Religions, (03.21.2021)
Lopez, Ian. Biden Drug Price Pressure of Patent Office Draws Skeptics. Bloomberg Law, (09.21.2021)
Love, Shayla. Is It Possible to Create an Ethical Psychedelics Company?. Vice, (04.06.2021)
McDermott, Eileen. TRIPS IP Waiver Proposal Will Kill More People Than It Saves. IPWatchdog.com | Patents & Patent Law, (01.12.2022)
Morris, Hamilton. Synthetic Toad Venom Machine. Ep.3.1 Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, (2020)
Mossoff, Adam. Thank You, Senator Tillis, for Recognizing the Need for Evidence-Based Policymaking in Patent Law. IPWatchdog.com | Patents & Patent Law, (02.15.2022)
Nkengasong, John. Africa’s Low Vaccination Rates Should Concern Everyone. The New York Times, (03.27.2022)
Sanger-Katz, Margot. House Passes Bill to Limit Cost of Insulin to $35 a Month. The New York Times, (03.31.2022)
Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Broadway Paperbacks, (2011)
Ward, Erin H., Kevin J. Hickey, and Kevin T. Richards. Drug Prices: The Role of Patents and Regulatory Exclusivities. Congressional Research Service, (02.10.2021)
World Trade Organization. TRIPS, the Intellectual Property System and COVID-19. WTO, (2020)
PUTIN, UKRAINE, AND IMPERIALISM
Burbank, Jane. The Grand Theory Driving Putin to War. The New York Times, (03.22.2022)
Chotiner, Isaac. Vladimir Putin’s Revisionist History of Russia and Ukraine. The New Yorker, (02.23.2022)
Erlanger, Steven. Putin’s War on Ukraine Is About Ethnicity and Empire. The New York Times, (03.16.2022)
Gumenyuk, Nataliya. Ukrainians Are Fighting a People’s War — and Everyone Is Involved, from Top to Bottom. Washington Post, (03.07.2022)
Hrytsak, Yaroslav. Putin Made a Profound Miscalculation on Ukraine. The New York Times, (03.19.2022)
Kant, Immanuel. [Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and, What Is Enlightenment](Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and, What Is Enlightenment0 (excerpt). 2nd ed., Rev. The Library of Liberal Arts. New York : London: Macmillan ; Collier Macmillan, (1990)
Klein, Ezra. Ezra Klein Interviews Masha Gessen. The Ezra Klein Show, (03.11.2022)
Laruelle, Marlène. Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire. Washington, D.C. : Baltimore, Md: Woodrow Wilson Center Press ; Johns Hopkins University Press, (2008)
Lynch, Sarah N. U.S. Launches ‘KleptoCapture’ Task Force Aimed at Russian Oligarchs. Reuters, (March 2, 2022)
Radynski, Oleksiy. The Case Against the Russian Federation/ e-flux Journal, # 125, (03.2022)
Rail, Evan. ‘This Is Everyone’s Culture’: Ukraine’s Architectural Treasures Face Destruction. The New York Times, (03.11.2022)
Remnick, David. The Weakness of the Despot. The New Yorker, (03.11.2022)
Troianovski, Anton. Why Vladimir Putin Invokes Nazis to Justify His Invasion of Ukraine. The New York Times, (03.17.2022)
Troianovski, Anton, and Javier C. Hernández. Putin Goes Into Battle on a Second Front: Culture. The New York Times, (03.25.2022)
York, Steve. Orange Revolution. York Zimmerman Inc., (2007)
THE PROTECTION OF CULTURAL PROPERTY
Chambers, Veronica. The Wallpaper That Is Also a ‘Reminder That My Ancestors Had My Back.’. The New York Times, (03.25.2022)
Colwell, Chip, and Delande Justinvil. US Museums Hold the Remains of Thousands of Black People. The Conversation, (04.15.2021)
Crimmins, Peter. Historic Skulls of Black Americans to Be Repatriated by Penn Museum. PBS | WHYY (blog), (04.14.2021)
Ester Pantalony, Rina. Managing Intellectual Property for Museums. World Intellectual Property Organization, (2013)
Evangelita, Alyssa. The Exploitation of Wayúu Artisans and Their Mochila Bags. Fembot Magazine, (10.09.2017)
The Fashion Law. Chanel, Dior Among Brands Targeted With Russian Trademark Filings. The Fashion Law, (03.21.2022)
Flores, Chantal. Mexico’s Cultural Appropriation Ban Is off to a Messy Start. The Verge, (02.12.2022)
Hickley, Catherine. Belgium Plans to Hand Back Colonial Loot to DR Congo. The Art Newspaper, (12.24.2021)
Hughes, Sally Eaves, and Gala Porras-Kim. Gala Porras-Kim’s Fluid Conversation on Dry Conservation. ARTnews, (03.15.2022)
Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press, (2015)
Marriott, Hannah. Mexico Accuses Zara and Anthropologie of Cultural Appropriation. The Guardian, (06.01.2021)
Mead, Rebecca. Should Leopards Be Paid for Their Spots?. The New Yorker, (03.21.2022)
Wilson, Charles. An Artist Finds a Dignified Ending for an Ugly Story. The New York Times, (02.11.2013)
WHAT IS “FAIR” USE?
Abdurraqib, Hanif. A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance. Random House, (2021)
———. The Selling of Two Timberlakes. Pacific Standard, (01.11.2018)
Dan, Dapper. Dapper Dan Explains the Birth of His Legendary ‘Knock-Up’ Logo Clothing. Esquire, (06.06.2019)
Hall, Perry A. African-American Music: Dynamics of Appropriation and Innovation. In Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, (1997)
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Morris, Wesley. Why Is Everyone Always Stealing Black Music?. The New York Times, (08.14.2019)
Oswald, John. CEC — EContact! 16.4 — Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative. CEC | Canadian Electroacoustic Community, (03.2015)
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Weschler, Lawrence. “A debate on who owns history, between painter Joy Garnett and photographer Susan Meiselas”. NY Institute for the Humanities’s “Comedies of Fair U$e” Conference, NYU, (04.29.2006)
FOOD, PATENTS, AND EMPIRE
Antonelli, Paola. Is Corn Feeding a Lie?. MoMA’s Broken Nature Podcast, (April 2021).
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Center for Food Safety. History of U.S. Seed Development and Patent Regimes. (2022)
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Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Barbaric History of Sugar in America. The New York Times, (08.14.2019)
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Roberts, Justin. Sugar in the Atlantic World. Oxford Bibliographies, (02.22.2018)
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SPACE: THE IMPERIAL FRONTIER?
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