Larry Lessig made an appearance on The Colbert Report this past Thursday night. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a brief transcript as well as a video embed of the interview. It’s actually quite good. Here’s a snippet:

Colbert: Nobody should take my work and do anything with it that is not approved! Ever ever never ever take anything of mine and remix it! For instance, I will be very angry and possibly litigious if anyone out there takes this interview right here and remixes it with some great dance beat. And it starts showing up in clubs across America.

Lessig: Actually, we’re joint copyright owners. I’m ok with that. You can totally remix this. I’m fine with that.

Boom!

French investigators claim to have uncovered a large-scale counterfeiting operation led by a Parisian artist that produced fake 20th-century design classics by Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Alexandre Noll and Pierre Chareau. Six suspects, including four members of the artist’s family, were arrested on 25 November; they are accused of counterfeiting, receiving counterfeit goods and fraud.

Details herefrom The Art Newspaper.

The Art Newspaper just published a short article by Lene Berg, the artist whose work was allegedly censored by Cooper Union. We covered this story last year, with an update linking to a website which details the events surrounding the removal of Berg’s work. A bit from her Art Newspaper article:

If the Civil Liberties Union is right in assuming that the banners were removed because of their content, this case is probably a good example of how censorship works in a liberal democracy. Instead of direct censorship, we have rules and regulations that allow people in power to stop whatever does not please them, without making their reasons public.

This week’s New York Magazine has an interesting story on New York’s MoMA and their recent acquisitions of performance art. The ephemeral nature of the works highlights the legal issues raised by art works that supposedly are not memorialized via film, video or props. Adding to this complex schema is the contractual nature of MoMA’s contract with Tino Sehgal regarding his performance, Kiss. According to New York Magazine, the contract was not memorialized in writing but rather “sealed…with a spoken contract.”

Purchasing Kiss was especially complex, because the hallmark of Sehgal’s work is that it’s undocumented. (In the piece, couples dance, touch, and make out for two choreographed hours.) There’s no script or manual. The how-to is passed on orally, like a folktale[.]

We’re trying to ascertain the validity of this claim, and if so, the nature of the agreement.

Thieves stole more than 30 art works over the New Year’s holiday, including works by Picasso and Matisse. The works, stolen from a Berlin gallery, are worth an estimated $250,000. More from Yahoo! News.

Prince Charles-Emmanuel de Bourbon-Parme, who alleges to be a direct descendant of Louis XIV, has initiated a legal battle against Jeff Koons in what he describes as a “mercenary” and “pornographic” stain on his illustrious family’s honour.

According to The Guardian, Bourbon-Parme “says the exhibition, which is due to close in just over a week, is an attack on the ‘right immemorial’ of all human beings not to see their ancestors disrespected. Undeterred by an initial ruling this week from a judge in Versailles which rejected his plea to ban the installation, De Bourbon-Parme vowed yesterday to take his mission to the council of state, France’s highest administrative court.”

During this season of gifts, unwrappings, and surprises, British embassies and government buildings have discovered numerous public artworks missing.

Works of art worth hundreds of thousands of pounds are missing from British embassies and other official buildings around the world. At least 50 paintings from the Government Art Collection are unaccounted for, according to the latest audit. None was insured. Some are known to have been stolen but more than half the total simply disappeared.