Copyright Law

"The city's attorneys set Clearwater on a path that led to unnecessary expense, public ridicule and losses in court"

Posted on August 01, 2009
The St. Petersburg Times editorial board on the fish mural suit.

Balancing Act

Posted on July 31, 2009
Eric Felten writes in the Wall Street Journal on the National Portrait Gallery-Wikipedia dispute:"Copyright law exists for a purpose: to make creativity pay. Making accurate photographic copies of paintings is no doubt valuable and involves painstaking work...

"I have to be honest?I don?t like the sound of this"

Posted on July 31, 2009
Paddy Johnson wonders about the strength of the Rose lawsuit.

Forgery Suit

Posted on July 30, 2009
Josh Baer: "ACA Galleries Inc have sued Joseph Kinney alleging that he sold them a Milton Avery painting 'Summer Table Gloucester' for $200,000 in 2007 that was a forgery. They assert that Kinney actually bought the work for $65,000 from Angela Hamblin who had been convicted of other art forgeries...

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Another Bull Suit

Posted on July 30, 2009
Arturo Di Modica, who created the famous "Charging Bull" sculpture near Wall Street, has sued Random House and the authors of a new book about the collapse of Lehman Brothers for using the sculpture on the book's cover without permission. Story here. Previous suit mentioned here.

Leibovitz Suit

Posted on July 30, 2009
Art Capital Group is suing photographer Annie Leibovitz. Story in the NYT City Room blog here. The Art Market Monitor has more. Art Capital's loans to Leibovitz were mentioned in a front-page NYT story on art-based lending back in February.

Clearwater Cuts Bait

Posted on July 29, 2009
The city of Clearwater, Florida has agreed to pay $55,000 to settle the fish mural first amendment case mentioned earlier here. The bait shop owner gets to keep his mural up; the money goes to the ACLU.

"Another day, another deaccession controversy"

Posted on July 28, 2009
Daniel Grant has the latest in the Maine Antique Digest. It involves the St. Augustine Historical Society, which apparently "maintains a collection of documents, maps, photographs, and other printed material about the history of St. Augustine (the oldest city in the U...

More on the Rose Complaint

Posted on July 28, 2009
I've now had a chance to read the Rose complaint. It's no easy task. It's 12 pages long, but then they attach about 140 pages of various exhibits -- and they just kind of dump it all there, with no real effort to tie the documents back to the specific allegations in the complaint...

Rose Suit

Posted on July 27, 2009
The NYT's Randy Kennedy reports that "three overseers of the Rose Art Museum filed suit Monday in state court in Massachusetts, seeking to halt Brandeis University's plans to close the museum and clear the way to sell some of its work."I haven't read the complaint yet (you can do so here), but keep in mind that the latest version of the plan is not to "close" the Rose but instead to turn it into "a teaching and exhibition gallery...

"Knowledge, Labor, Property"

Posted on July 27, 2009
Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento gets a few things off his chest regarding copyright ("It's time that U.S. courts put an end to the belief by many that it's ok to make a bountiful living off the work of someone else") and deaccessioning ("While museums continue to suffer closings, layoffs and cutbacks, the College Art Association initiates an anti-deaccessioning petition...

Come On In

Posted on July 27, 2009
I missed this before the weekend, but apparently the court granted Mannie Garcia's motion to intervene in the Shepard Fairey-AP lawsuit.

" . . . and some are even closing"

Posted on July 25, 2009
The Deaccessioning Blog points to a USA Today story under the headline "Museums' funding sources going bone dry" and quips: "Continue those anti-deaccessioning petitions!"As I've said before, if only these museums had a source of revenue to tap into when times got tough.

Speaking of the Catcher in the Rye decision ...

Posted on July 25, 2009
The New York Times reports that the plaintiff has appealed Judge Batts's no-fair-use decision. You can read the appellate brief here. At the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, Ashby Jones says "it?s pretty clear that [the plaintiff's] lawyers understand that the case will likely turn on [the] 'transformative' issue": the brief "focuses to a large degree on this 'transformation' idea, largely by highlighting the degree to which [the book] allegedly comments on Salinger?s relationship to the novel and the Holden Caulfield character itself...

"There's reason to believe here that not just any old photo would have sufficed"

Posted on July 23, 2009
Southwestern Law School's Dave Fagundes has an interesting post up at Prawfsblawg that goes to the Gaylord discussion just below, but is really more about the Fairey-AP dispute, so I thought I'd give it its own post. It's about the fourth fair use factor -- "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work...

Is Pretty Convincing Convincing Enough?

Posted on July 23, 2009
University of Detroit Mercy Law School Professor Peter Friedman says my post on the Gaylord stamp decision is "ridiculous" and (possibly) "disingenuous." I wrote that the case is a good example of "how you can make the traditional four-factor fair use analysis do whatever you want it to do," and I cited Judge Kozinski's comment that "the analysis can always go in either direction...

"I've always thought it wise to be a bit skeptical of anyone claiming the high-road in serving public interest . . ."

Posted on July 23, 2009
". . . especially when they're potentially being sued," says Ed Winkleman in response to the Wikipedia-National Portrait Gallery dispute. Lots of interesting points by Joy Garnett in the comments too.

"Who Buys Art on a Cruise Ship?"

Posted on July 22, 2009
The Art Market Monitor flags another Park West Galleries story and says: "Though there?s no excuse for buying art on the say-so of a dealer who tells you it is a great investment, the cruise ships should be ashamed of their willingness to embrace this confidence game...

ARCA News

Posted on July 22, 2009
The New York Times had a story today on the master?s program in international art crime studies being sponsored by ARCA (the Association for Research Into Crimes Against Art). Derek Fincham, who's one of the teachers in the program, offers some reflections here and here...

"I could design a museum where there would be almost no risk of theft, but it wouldn?t be fun to visit"

Posted on July 21, 2009
Bloomberg reports that the Picasso sketchbook stolen in June still hasn't been recovered, and places the theft in the context of "several French arts institutions to have been robbed or vandalized recently."

Fairly Useless

Posted on July 21, 2009
Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento points to a strange case in the Court of Federal Claims which ruled that a postage stamp featuring a photograph of a sculpture was a fair use. The Court held that the stamp was "transformative, providing a different expressive character than [the sculpture]...

"Wikipedia painting row escalates"

Posted on July 21, 2009
That's the BBC News headline on the story mentioned last week here.The deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation (which runs Wikipedia) says: "It is hard to see a plausible argument that excluding public domain content from a free, non-profit encyclopaedia serves any public interest whatsoever...

"Barrel Monster" Sentence

Posted on July 21, 2009
50 hours of community service.Background here.

"We reverse the trial court?s finding that the Georgia O?Keeffe Museum has standing"

Posted on July 16, 2009
"We also reverse the trial court?s finding that the gifts to the University were motivated by a specific charitable intent instead of a general charitable intent, the finding that the University cannot establish that it is entitled to cy pres relief, and the order dismissing the Amended Petition of the University for cy pres relief...

Sotomayor and Photography

Posted on July 16, 2009
The NYT's David Dunlap discusses another art law connection for Judge Sotomayor. Related post here.

ALR Acquisition

Posted on July 16, 2009
"The Art Loss Register (ALR) announced the acquisition of the register of stolen art and antiques from Trace, a subsidiary by MyThings which will become a minority shareholder in the ALR."

Bridgeman Two?

Posted on July 16, 2009
The Guardian reports that London's National Portrait Gallery "has threatened legal proceedings" against a US resident "who downloaded thousands of high-resolution images from its website, and placed them in an archive of free-to-use images on Wikipedia...

More on the Fisk Decision

Posted on July 16, 2009
More on the Court of Appeals decision in the Fisk-O'Keeffe case from Diverse magazine here and the Wall Street Journal Law Blog here. The latter characterizes the decision as holding "that Fisk owns O?Keeffe?s work at this point and therefore is free to do what it wants with its 101-piece, $60-million collection," but, as noted yesterday, that isn't quite right...

A Second Salander Indictment

Posted on July 14, 2009
Bloomberg has the story here.

"Daniel Moore and the Neverending Lawsuit"

Posted on July 14, 2009
The Tuscaloosa News brings us up to date on the lawsuit between the University of Alabama and sports artist Daniel Moore. The short version: "Now, the case may be close to reaching its sixth judge, and attorneys are back to arguing over year-old motions...

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