Category Archives: Copyright

Street artist and community fight for dismembered mural

Posted on: December 18, 2015 by Alexander Herman

British street artist “Stik”, known for painting giant stick-figure images on buildings around the world has become involved in a campaign to restitute a mural he helped create in the city of Gdansk, Poland in 2011. The mural, which features a series of 53 stick figures holding hands in celebration of the local community, was […]

Conference tomorrow

Posted on: November 27, 2015 by Ruth Redmond-Cooper

Our conference/study forum entitled Recent Developments in Art and Cultural Property Law will be held tomorrow at Notre Dame University in London from 9:30 to 5:00. It will cover a vast array of topics: street art, museum ethics, criminal sentencing, copyright, treasure and the discovery of Richard III. We look forward to seeing you there.

Tuymans settlement and copyright exceptions

Posted on: October 5, 2015 by Alexander Herman

It was announced last week that two Belgian creators had reached a settlement in a copyright dispute highlighting the role (and limits) of copyright exceptions. One was a photographer, Katrijn Van Giel, who had taken a photograph of Belgian politician Jean-Marie Dedecker that appeared in De Standard newspaper in 2010. It was a fairly unique shot: creatively cropped […]

Upcoming Shows on Appropriation and Pop Art

Posted on: September 16, 2015 by Alexander Herman

Two interesting exhibitions are coming up. One is at Sotheby’s in New York and will feature appropriation art by the likes of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. It will run from 23 September to 16 October and yes, the works are for sale. The other is at London’s Tate Modern and will feature Pop Artists from the […]

The Moral Rights in a Banksy?

Posted on: September 14, 2015 by Alexander Herman

As reported far and wide, last Friday a High Court decision was rendered in a case involving a piece of Banksy street art called ‘Art Buff’, which had been stripped off a wall in Folkestone, England, and sent to the US for sale. The work had been added to the side of a building in 2014, in conjunction with a town […]

Banksy’s Dismaland and the Power of Parody

Posted on: August 28, 2015 by Alexander Herman

Last week, the Banksy-organised theme park known as Dismaland opened in the English seaside town of Weston-super-mare, billed specifically as a place ‘unsuitable for children’. The park has already been reported and commented on thoroughly in the media, notably by The Guardian and in Boodle Hatfield’s blog, for its twist on traditional notions of amusement parks and family-friendly enjoyment. Here […]

Yassin, reuse and copyright

Posted on: July 29, 2015 by Alexander Herman

Those adventurous enough to explore the London area of Holland Park for their cultural fix (there is opera in the park after all), may have come across the house of Frederic (Lord) Leighton, which is open to the public as a museum. Leighton, who was President of the Royal Academy during the late Nineteenth Century, created the Victorian collector’s […]

No more personal copying… of artworks?

Posted on: July 21, 2015 by Alexander Herman

There was an interesting development last week in the area of copyright exceptions in the UK. A judge of the High Court quashed (i.e. nullified or rendered inoperable) the exception introduced by the Government last October through the Personal Copies for Private Use Regulations 2014. This is quite something. The courts, through judicial review, are overturning a governmental mechanism which had allowed […]

Update on Freedom of Panorama

Posted on: July 10, 2015 by Alexander Herman

Just a quick update to say that yesterday the European Parliament voted – overwhelmingly – to remove the proposed restrictions on Freedom of Panorama (FOP) from the report currently being debated. The proposal had been outlined in two earlier blogs: here and here. That means the status quo will be maintained: countries such as the UK, […]

Last call for ‘Freedom of Panorama’

Posted on: July 8, 2015 by Alexander Herman

As the European Parliament is set to vote tomorrow on the amended Report dealing with the harmonisation of ‘Freedom of Panorama’ across Europe, the opposition to the Report has taken off. This can be seen in the nearly 500,000 digital signatures acquired in the last week alone protesting the current provisions of the Report: notably the […]