Category Archives: Copyright

Ticking Away: Christian Marclay’s The Clock and Copyright Law

Posted on: September 12, 2018 by Alexander Herman

A stern-looking man with a gun turns towards a metallic device mounted on the wall. He places one hand on the device’s handle and checks his watch. It is 12.04. Next we see an analogue clock hanging above a presenter reading the BBC radio news into a microphone. The time on the clock reads 12.05. […]

The V&A’s ReACH programme

Posted on: February 28, 2018 by Alexander Herman

We were fortunate enough to be able to take the students from the LLM programme in Art, Business and Law to the V&A to hear the museum’s in-house solicitor, Anthony Misquitta, speak about the various legal issues faced by the institution on a daily basis. This covered things like copyright and digitisation, trade mark issues […]

The Impact of Brexit on IP in the UK

Posted on: February 9, 2018 by Holly Woodhouse

The current intellectual property framework in the United Kingdom is underpinned by various international agreements, but is fundamentally shaped by EU Directives transposed into UK law.  With the Government yet to outline how transposed EU law will operate within the UK following the repeal of the European Communities Act 1972, the fate of the UK’s […]

Banksy’s Paint Pot Angel, legal rights and the art market

Posted on: January 19, 2018 by Alexander Herman

An interesting story has made it out of Bristol, the home city (apparently) of the elusive street artist Banksy. Back in 2009, Banksy had collaborated with the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery on an exhibition called Banksy versus Bristol Museum. In true Banksy style, it featured a burnt-out ice cream van on the Museum’s front […]

An important step towards asserting graffiti artists’ rights

Posted on: November 21, 2017 by Julia Rodrigues Casella Hommes

A recent finding of a jury in a Federal District Court in Brooklyn, New York City,[1] has opened the door for greater protection for graffiti artists. At the core of disputes between graffiti artists and the real property owners their works adorn often lies the age-old debate as to whose property rights prevail: those of […]

Public domain and the internet

Posted on: May 24, 2017 by Alexander Herman

A number of issues arise when we use images of artistic works online. Here, I am referring to copyright and to the specific treatment of images of older works that may – or may not – have fallen into the public domain. Of course, once copyright has expired in a work, that work will enter the public […]

Jeff Koons infringes French photographer’s copyright

Posted on: May 4, 2017 by Hélène Deslauriers

In March, Jeff Koons and the Pompidou Centre in Paris were held jointly liable for copyright infringement.  The work at issue was a porcelain sculpture of about 40 inches representing two naked children.  The sculpture was part of Koons’s ‘Banality’ series and was scheduled to be part of a Koons retrospective at the Pompidou Centre […]

Charging Bull, Fearless Girl and comparative moral rights

Posted on: April 25, 2017 by Alexander Herman

A story has been brewing over the past few weeks involving the famed Charging Bull sculpture that sits in the middle of Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan. The sculpture was made by Arturo di Modica and installed without permission near Wall St as a Christmas gift from the artist to New Yorkers in December 1989. […]

What is art? And should courts of law decide?

Posted on: February 28, 2017 by Alexander Herman

In Yasmina Reza’s 1994 play ‘Art‘, three male friends spend much time discussing the question, ‘What is art?’ The reason is that one of the characters, Serge, has bought a work from a popular contemporary artist that is more or less just a white canvas. More or less, because there is some debate as to whether […]

Lubaina Himid and the power of appropriation art

Posted on: February 16, 2017 by Alexander Herman

There is a very intriguing exhibition on at the moment at Modern Art Oxford featuring the artist Lubaina Himid. She makes political, opinionated and at times furious pieces in various media, from sculpture to canvas to pottery. The show is called Invisible Strategies and spans work going back to the artist’s early days in the 1980s to pieces created just last year. […]