If you think art law is the new black, well, you’re wrong. It’s sexy, but not as sexy and black as fashion law.

Last week, Property Outlaws authors, Sonia K. Katyal and Eduardo Moisés Peñalver, wrote a brief but concise critique of intellectual property monopolies and the current attempt by Harvard Law Professor Jeannie Suk and Senator Charles Schumer to provide fashion designs with copyright protection. Katyal and Penalver argue that not only do we see increased litigation, but, similarly to drug patents,

creating intellectual property protection comes at a steep social cost. Providing a limited-time monopoly to innovators allows them to charge monopoly prices. While this is arguably necessary to allow innovators to recoup development costs, it also puts the protected goods out of reach of many consumers[.]

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Well, for some it does.

Nate Harrison mentioned this to me on Monday, and Artforum has some succinct coverage on UC-San Diego Visual Arts Professor Ricardo Dominguez and his avant-garde shenanigans. It seems Dominguez “recently helped launch an ‘online sit-in’ against the website of University of California president Mark Yudof. The strategy had about four hundred participants visit Yudof’s website repeatedly for about ninety minutes, in an attempt to slow it down (similar to what is called a ‘denial of-service attack,’ which floods a website with traffic, freezing it), as a protest against budget cuts to the UC system and the administration’s priorities.”

Now, Dominguez is wanted for questioning by university administrators, while the professor has publicly defended himself by claiming the right of free expression.

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Over a beer last week, a friend commented to me that law is currently the hot and sexy topic in the so-called “art world.” I chuckled, mentioning that if true, it would be lamentable if law was taken in a simplistic form, meaning in a symbolic and representational manner more so than as a practice and medium: where art engages law to test itself, law, or both.

Enter the Van Abbemuseum. In one of its current exhibitions, In-Between Minimalisms; Free Sol Lewitt, the museum asks:

What obstacles do museums encounter in the process of collecting cultural heritage? What is the nature of the tension that ensues from the proliferation of mass information sharing (the Internet) on the one hand and copyright law, which imposes limits on information sharing, on the other? What does it mean for a museum to ‘possess’ a work of art. What is actually owned?

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This past January 1st, Ireland’s parliament clarified an old antiblasphemy law, defining it as any statement “grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion,” and added a fine of up to $34,000 for offenders.

Taking this new law as a point of departure, the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art curated a show, aptly titled, you guessed it, Blasphemous, which opened on Good Friday (April 2nd), and which aims a direct attack at this law.

However, visual artists need not fret, as the new law has an exception that should comfort artists like those featured in the blasphemy exhibition. The law provides for a defense in cases of materials “that a reasonable person would find of genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific or academic value.” This week’s Time Magazine has a bit more on scheduled protests as well as IMOCA’s upcoming summer show, These Artists Are Criminals. Check out some of the work here:

Well, at least in the UK. According to the British Council’s Counterpoint:

The world’s first copyright law was passed by the English Parliament on 10 April 1710 as ‘An Act for the Encouragement of Learning’. Its 300th anniversary provides a unique opportunity to review copyright’s purposes and principles.  If today we were starting from scratch, but with the same aim of encouraging learning‚ what kind of copyright would we want?

To answer this question, the British Council is organising a series of meetings in London, Shanghai and elsewhere. Our starting point is the question, What is the purpose of copyright? And, once that is agreed, even tentatively, how could we achieve it? Is the list of ‘qualifying works’ the right one? Should copyright arise automatically or should rights be registered? Is ‘copyright’ the appropriate name? How do we balance access and ownership? What are the optimal lengths of copyright terms? What is the role of moral rights, and of personal data and privacy? What do we mean by ‘fair’ in the phrases ‘fair dealing’ and ‘fair use’ and how do we uphold this fairness in practice? Is fairness in a physical world different from fairness in the digital space? How do we define unlawful copying and how do we promote a fair regime of sanctions and penalties?

Their poll seems to indicate (at the time of this posting), that 97% of respondents do not think the UK Digital Economy Bill strikes the right balance between fostering creativity and protecting rights. Perhaps one “free culture” person sat there for 24-hours and kept clicking “no”? Check out Counterpoint’s Online Copyright Project.

This week’s The Economist weighs in on a topic I’ve been writing about recently (here and here): copyright and its effects on creativity. Whereas I argue that current copyright laws (at least in the US) do not hamper or negate creativity, The Economist thinks that they in fact do. Furthermore, The Economist thinks that copyright is, as William Patry believes, a government grant and not, as I believe, a property right.

Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work, not a property right. From 1710 onwards, it has involved a deal in which the creator or publisher gives up any natural and perpetual claim in order to have the state protect an artificial and limited one.

Speaking against current copyright terms (see this great chart for current UK copyright terms), The Economist continues:

The notion that lengthening copyright increases creativity is questionable[.]…At the moment, the terms of trade favour publishers too much. A return to the 28-year copyrights of the Statute of Anne would be in many ways arbitrary, but not unreasonable. If there is a case for longer terms, they should be on a renewal basis, so that content is not locked up automatically. The value society places on creativity means that fair use needs to be expanded and inadvertent infringement should be minimally penalised. None of this should get in the way of the enforcement of copyright, which remains a vital tool in the encouragement of learning. But tools are not ends in themselves.

Not sure that fair use should be expanded. However, they may have a point as to the current copyright terms, and I do like their argument for longer terms on a renewable basis. This seems to imply that the “privilege” of elongated copyright protection would come to the copyright holder conditioned on a duty of care (A type of adverse possession if you will). Click here to access The Economist’s article

Via Bloomberg News:

Lucia Eames, the daughter of 20th Century furniture designer Charles Eames and his wife, Ray, asked a Chicago court to block the planned auction of an archive of her parents’ photos and other materials. Eames, in a lawsuit filed yesterday in Illinois state court, claims the items on the block belong to her stepmother’s trust and the family-run Eames Office LLC, not to the sellers.