When Art Museums Infringe Copyrights and Moral Rights

This image was originally posted to Flickr by Kent Wang.

Our good friend and law professor at Texas Wesleyan School of Law, Megan Carpenter, analyzes the intellectual property issues concerning art museums and their interactive, collaborative, and user-generated exhibitions. In particular, she asks whether these museum strategies run afoul of U.S. Copyright law as well as the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act, otherwise known as moral rights.

She focuses on a recent exhibition by the Dallas Museum of Art, where a sound installation played on speakers throughout the show and responded directly to the works on display. Artist Chapman Kelley publicly objected to the collaborative project, requesting that his work be removed from the exhibition and returned to him. Kelley claimed that the soundscape effectively used his existing work to create a new piece of art without his consent. The Museum refused.

From the SSRN site:

This article explores efforts by museums and galleries to enhance user experience (and increase attendance) using technology to create interactive and engaging exhibitions, and considers the copyright implications of this “participatory museum” movement. From the derivative rights provisions in the Copyright Act to the Visual Artists’ Rights Act, where do the artist’s rights stop and the museum’s obligations begin, and how is the public’s interest best served?

The law review article is was published in the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, Vol. 13, No. 3, Spring 2011, and can be downloaded here.