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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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. […]
Posted on: August 30, 2016 by Emily Gould
Our attention has been drawn yet again, this week, to the vexed question of ‘fair use’ as an exception to copyright protection under US law. When is a new work of art which draws on an existing copyright work acceptable, and when does it overstep the mark? The saga surrounding well-known appropriation artist Richard Prince […]