Earlier this month, Complex covered Supreme’s hitting Leah McSweeney of clothing line Married to the MOB with a $10 million lawsuit for copyright infringement, as McSweeney did a parody of the streetwear label’s logo as “Supreme Bitch.” Rightly, Complex wondered what the conceptual artist who inspired the logo in the first place thought about it, namely Barbara Kruger with her red and white sans serif text work. Here’s her response.
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The UK has passed a new act that has photographers and other creators worried about maintaining ownership of their images. The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act theoretically aims to make it easier for companies to publish orphan works, which are images and other content whose author or copyright can’t be identified. But whereas in the past, orphan works were often out-of-print books and historical unattributed photos, today millions of images are quickly orphaned online, as they move from Instagram to Twitter to Facebook to Tumblr without attribution along the way.
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The Cariou v. Prince decision was handed down last Thursday. I have struggled with what to write primarily because I have been shocked into a catatonic state. How two intelligent minds could draft such an epic disaster is beyond any form of comprehension.
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Wednesday night, a decision by a three-judge appellate court panel marked a turnaround in the closely watched copyright infringement case Cariou v. Prince, pitting photographer Patrick Cariou against art star Richard Prince. Hyperallergic consults intellectual property expert Peter Friedman on the new outcome, with further exclusive commentary from Cariou’s attorney.
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Patrick Cariou’s lawsuit against artist Richard Prince for wrongfully appropriating his photographs of Rastafarians into new artworks provided a benchmark for the role of copyright in contemporary art, though the case is still being debated in appeals. But how do those same issues impact the world of design, where knockoffs of iconic designs are omnipresent and it’s even more difficult to tell when inspiration becomes appropriation, and appropriation becomes infringement? Later this year, the British government plans on extending the copyright term for design, stretching the protected period from 25 years from when the creation was first marketed to 70 years after the death of the object’s creator. Could that policy impact the creative dynamism of design in the U.K.?
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Continuing a tradition we began last year, we’d like to wish you not just Happy New Year today, but also Happy Public Domain Day!
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In what can only be described as the most unbelievable turn of events around the Beast Jesus debacle, Techdirt says the woman at the center of the global sensation is claiming copyright and wants a cut of the tourist money bonanza that has hit the small Spanish church.
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LOS ANGELES — In the great pipeline of innovation, we always hear about that spark of genius, the agonizing product development, the design team debates, and then at least the final product rolling out on shelves. But one item is typically lost in this narrative: the patent.
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It’s a cruel world that makes a thief out of an adoring fan. Erik den Breejen is a keen Beach Boys fan and one who knows, now, what the back of a beloved hand feels like.
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‘Transformative use’ is just mucking things up. That’s what I think. Providing a pivot for the Cariou v Prince case and the only real point of interest no matter what the pundits say, transformative use, instead of the fog-clearing test that it was supposed to be, has become the main particulate in a legal fog of war that has lasted three years now. Thus far, the dueling Cariou v Prince briefs have added new certainty to my theory that transformative use is a singularly unhelpful notion.
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