Greenpeace’s spoof of Volkswagen’s Darth Vader ad has been pulled by YouTube because of a copyright dispute with LucasFilm.

Greenpeaces’ parody was meant to bring attention to what it claims are efforts by the German automaker to stop carbon dioxide emission controls in Europe. In the Greenpeace ad, Jedi tree huggers, including Yoda, take a direct shot at VW, blaming the company for trying to destroy the world with a VW-branded Death Star.

This may be an instance when Youtube and the DMCA do not do fair use doctrine justice. However, one can certainly see an argument that this is not parody but rather satire. The counter may be that the critique and criticism is not just of VW, but of the original VW ad that employs Star Wars characters and content. We’ll see what happens.

Thanks to Timesfreepress for covering the story.

A man walked into the Weinstein Gallery in San Francisco and grabbed a Picasso pencil drawing off the wall and fled in a waiting taxicab. The drawing is reportedly worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Via The Seattle Times.

A Luxembourg company is suing New York’s ABA Gallery in federal court for $6.5 million for allegedly selling forged and over-valued Russian art. The case against the gallery, which specializes in Russian art…hinges on the sale of 18 works of art from the 19th and 20th centuries between 2006 and 2007. The [Luxembourg] company says four of the 18 works were forged and that ABA exaggerated the market value of the other 14.

Via Artinfo.

Priceless!

When the contract says something different than what is advertised.

Remember the big fiasco concerning Brandeis University’s possible fire sale of the Rose Art Museum’s collection? Well, the Chronicle of Higher Education has published the following news.

Brandeis University announced on Thursday that it would not sell any part of its prized collection of modern art at its Rose Art Museum, ending a long-simmering dispute that had cast a negative light on the Massachusetts institution.

However, Donn Zaretsky takes issue with this statement as well as headlines from the Boston Globe, LA Times, and The Art Newspaper.

That isn’t quite right.  What the settlement agreement says (you can read it here; see the last sentence of paragraph 1) is that Brandeis “has no aim, plan, design, strategy or intention to sell any artwork.” There’s a big difference between saying that and saying they promise not to sell any artwork.

Glad someone’s doing some content checking.

An art thief made off with a small 8″ x 10″ Fernand Leger painting worth approximately $350,000 from the Carlyle Hotel last Tuesday morning.

One step back. Once again we have a settlement in another copyright infringement lawsuit.

Readers may remember this lawsuit from a couple of years ago (we covered it over a year ago), where sculptor Jack Mackie sued photographer Mike Hipple after Hipple took a picture of a woman dancing near Mackie’s sculpture and sold the picture to a stock photo agency. Mackie’s sculpture piece consists of bronze dance steps embedded in a sidewalk.

The case was scheduled for trial this July, but has officially been dismissed, and a settlement reached. Hipple added, “I also believe now that the financial stakes are such that it is not worth continuing to fight.”

Thanks to our friends in Seattle for passing this along. You can read more on the story here.