A man accused of defacing a Picasso painting at a Houston museum surrendered to U.S. marshals at the U.S.-Mexico border yesterday.

And it’s not for kids, or designed for kids.

The app, Marksta, was designed by photojournalist John D. McHugh, and here’s what it allows you to do.

Marksta allows you to watermark your photography, adding text or a logo directly from your iPhone. Copyright your images before sharing them to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, etc. Or add your Twitter name, or your website address. Whatever you want to write, Marksta makes it simple and fast.

According to Marksta’s site, it only works on i-Phones and not all i-Pads. Hope they get a Motorola and Samsung version out soon.

Copyright, copyright, copyright…

A Swiss man cannot share in the settlement the Museum of Modern Art has paid to his relatives over the provenance of two Picassos.

Last September four of Picasso’s five surviving heirs—Claude, Paloma Picasso, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, and Marina Ruiz-Picasso—circulated a letter announcing the establishment of a new procedure for authenticating works by the artist.

The letter states that all requests for authentication should henceforth be addressed to Claude, specifying that “only his opinions shall be fully and officially acknowledged by the undersigned.” Among the undersigned, however, one signature was conspicuously absent: that of Maya, the artist’s elder daughter.

Under French Law,

The right to authenticate Picasso’s work, however, is considered an inherited moral right, or droit moral. Only individual heirs have this right. When Claude [Ruiz-Picasso exercise’s] his droit moral to authenticate works by his father, he does so as an individual heir (as does Maya), not in his capacity as the estate administrator. Under French law, an artist’s descendants are presumed to have an innate understanding of—or at least a privileged firsthand familiarity with—the art created by their progenitor, and are thus entitled to issue certificates of authenticity.

So, it seems that there is now only one Picasso authority, minus one Picasso heir.

Via ArtNews.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a stick figure cartoon character engaged in various everyday activities is not protected by copyright. When two similar drawings of stick figures share anatomical features such as arms, legs, faces, and fingers, these poses and the ideas and their drawings belong to the public domain.

The case involves Albert and John Jacob’s Jake “Life is good” character and Gary Blehm’s Penman character. Blehm sued in 2009 alleging copyright infringement.

Via Courthouse News Service.

Is the Mattel v. MGA “Bratz” doll litigation still going on? Yes, 8 years and running. Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski had a witty suggestion, “You could also go outside in the corridor and settle the case.”

Just as I was taking a break from a hectic 2012, a friend e-mails me Daniel Grant’s article for the Huffington Post on the pervasiveness of law and lawsuits in contemporary art.

It was big money that drove the lawsuits over the most recent art season, but these cases are notable because they ask basic questions, from what is art to who decides where and how it will be sold and displayed. They are questions that in an earlier age might have been more a part of the general discourse — there was a time when art exhibitions elicited outrage and debate! — but are now left to the courts to decide.

So, if you still haven’t made your 2013 new year’s resolution, here’s a suggestion: Learn as much about copyright, contracts, authentication and moral rights as you possibly can.