Copyright issues have certainly had an airing with the recent attempt at law change in New Zealand with the now-scrapped Section 92A amendment, which would attempt to protect music and video copyright holders (arguably to the detriment of the public).
Some more photography/art based copyright issues are being raised at the moment with wrangling over two prominent art producers - Richard Prince and Shepard Fairey.
Fairey creates poster-like works with big blocks of primary colours and large text exhortations such as “Hope”. That tag appears on the work causing most controversy which has a picture of Obama looking like he will indeed bring hope to the US, and possibly the universe. The problem for Fairey is that Associated Press recognised the Obama picture as being styled on one of their photographs and has started a law suit. Fairey feels he is entitled to use it without attribution because of Fair Use rules (which allow portions of copyrighted works to be used for education, critique and creative works). Incidentally, Fairey is currently dealing with vandalism charges for allegedly postering the work in Boston.
Fairey is perhaps not the best thinker on issues of copyright since he appears to allow himself Fair Use use, but when others parody his own work he gets the lawyers out. He also was quoted, in defence of using a Cuan artists’ work for another of his own works, as saying “Well, how would I ever pay this guy anyway because he’s in Cuba?” (The guy subsequently contacted him and was paid around $1000 according to the Mother Jones article cited below).
Fairey started out as a street artist, bringing issues (among others, an anti-war stance) to the street and has recently created posters for “Shut Down Guantanamo” but at the same time runs a company Obey Giant (after his first well known work around wrestler Andre the Giant), which has apparently claimed that only he has the right to use the word Obey in art works. he also shoots his own way of working in the foot somewhat with this quote about Walmart selling his work on teeshirts: “the reason I get pissed off about stuff like that is because I didn’t build up the resonance for that image just to hand it off to someone to exploit.”
More info on Fairey see Mother Jones article
Also not very good at self-defence when appropriating is Richard Prince, who claims to use ’small portions’ of photographs by Patrick Cariou, whose work he describes as “not strikingly original” (he reworks 30 of the documentary photographs of Rasta culture from a book called Yes Rasta).
Cariou has filed a lawsuit against Prince which may or may not be related to the fact that Princes works fetched between $1.5 and $3 million.
These lawsuit outcomes will be significant both for the right of artists to appropriate or rework material, and for the right of artists to have some form of ownership or control over how their work is shown or used.
As I understand it, copyright law came about to try and help the originator of material get the most benefit from their creation, so that others could be prosecuted if they damaged the income of the originator by reselling without permission. Problems arise when copyright owners want to maximise profits by extending their copyright ownership in ways that conflict with the public interest (if I have a music cd or vinyl album, do I have to pay again to get it in mp3 format? Do works that have become essentially public domain, still have restricted uses - eg images of mickey mouse; the song “Happy Birthday”;)
Certainly, copyright and ownership of work has become such a complicated topic that it is hard to fathom for many people (many of the criticisms and comments about the above cases attack the artists as being sub-par or otherwise are completely distracted from the actual issues around appropriation; many of the excuses for pirating music and video are lame at best. Interestingly, very few comments have addressed the issue of the subjects in Cariou’s works, that are then, in Princes’, put alongside erotic or pornographic images - see Debra Frieden comments here), and if it doesn’t meet the real expectations of the public (when corporations are the only ones with time/money to understand the laws, use them (and help re-write them) for their own benefit), it may need a complete rethink, and such things as the ability to easily and accurately copy anything from music to 2 dimensional art (and perhaps soon 3d object,with the advent of 3d printers) is speeding this up.
Finally, the thing that started this item off was a series of posts in the MyArtSpace blog for april - this has items on the Fairey and Prince lawsuits and also a shockingly rock-star view on music copyright in an interview with Geoff Tate of Queensryche.
April 30th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Great article! It is interesting to hear these stories emerging following the interesting turn in Copyright law that has been occurring internationally over the past decade or so. Artists have been using derivative processes for centuries (appropriation, etc), so tightening Copyright law is inevitably going to produce some difficult outcomes for artists who take these working methods for granted.
Interestingly, in NZ we don’t have an equivalent Fair Use law (which is based on the Constitutional right to Freedom of Speech in the US). Our variation of this is called “Fair Dealing” which is much narrower. There is also no provision for satire & parody which paints a fairly bleak picture for the future of critical artworks. The Creative Freedom Foundation (http://creativefreedom.org.nz) are doing a lot of work to make sure artists are represented in NZ on these issues - and a fair balance between artist & public rights is found.
April 30th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
Thank you for including my commentary about photography as it relates to the humanistic side of subjects within photographs.
The fair use issue, or fair dealing has blasted the issue into a multifaceted issue. Between this and the rights grabbing that is going on world wide, I am hoping that an ethical and or legal code of conduct will evolve.
-DF
May 1st, 2009 at 10:07 am
Interestingly, the National Business Review have just reported that the National Government intend to completely rewrite the NZ Copyright Act:
http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/entire-copyright-act-be-scrapped-101820
http://creativefreedom.org.nz/story.html?id=278
May 4th, 2009 at 10:41 am
Thanks Debra and Bronwyn,
I’m just reading the following book by Lawrence Lessig:
Remix - Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy
He looks at a range of issues involving copyright use, and as far as I can make out so far, he seems to be advocating for a comprehensive review of the law, with more fair use, but with some ethical ties and a way that works to allow ‘amateur’ creativity (allowing normal people to do what they feel is normal - including mashups of music and such like), but still compensate creative invention when it makes sense. He gives a great example of how an artist was effectively stopped from exhibiting a work where 25 ordinary people were presented on video singing the whole of the Plastic Ono Band album. The work explored how people interact with popular culture icons, but ‘old’ ways of thinking about copyright meant too much hoop-jumping and delays.
He makes a good case for rethinking Fair Use, but so far in the book, has not addressed the more complex interests that the Richard Prince example brings up (I might email him and see if he has any interesting take on it).
You can download Lessigs book freely, here:
http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/remix.htm
Bronwyn, you are right about NZ not having fair use laws (and I think it is even illegal to media-shift eg ripping an owned CD to mp3 for use on a player), and Lessig would be saying that that is just not in tune with what ordinary people are doing all the time, so the law should catch up. The NBR piece about rewriting NZ copyright law is therefore very relevant.
I also notice in that item, the following:
“Most recently the government dropped the Copyright (Commissioning Rule) Amendment Bill.
This Bill proposed amending the Copyright Act so that the person who creates a copyright work, rather than the person who commissions the work, would be the first owner of copyright in that work.”
Reason given for dropping it is that a contract can sort out those issues. But anyone who’s done editorial work for a moderate sized publication knows that you either sign their contract or you don’t get the work again. Not exactly a level playing field.
…stu
May 4th, 2009 at 11:13 am
Further to my reply, it turns out that NZers are allowed to rip one copy of a CD to mp3 (but not similarly with DVDs).
I found this out on the site that Bronwyn is associated with - the NZ Creative Freedom site: http://creativefreedom.org.nz/
[Bronwyn is an artist, and musician in the group Elbow vs Knee, who allow downloads of their albums under a Creative Commons license]
Also on the CF site, I found this link to a great summary, by Matthwe Poole, of Lessig’s thesis via a talk he gave in NZ: http://publicaddress.net/default,5489.sm#post
May 9th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Another engaging conversation on copyright interpretation has been going on with Danish art collective SUPERFLEX (www.superflex.dk) see SUPERCOPY section. The collective have staged several projects which appropriate brand identities and products and questioning whether copyright laws which were designed to protect artists, should be being used to protect corporate interests. Their latest project at Artspace Auckland “Free Beer” used the idea of open source as a metaphor - giving away the recipe to make beer to all comers.
I note that they also have been collorating under the Creative Commons license.
May 9th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
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