Peter Friedman
Lawyer
Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity
Richard Prince’s doesn’t have to describe one of his paintings as a Rhino in Hot Pants Shouting, “Repent, Repent!” for it to be so.
Tom Waits on the “meanings” of his songs: If you break open a song, you’ll find the eggs of other songs. Misunderstandings are really kind of an epidemic and acceptable. I think it’s about one thing, but someone else will say, ‘That song is kind of a rhino in hot pants on a burnt rocking horse with a lariat shouting, “Repent, repent!” I think that’s great. Why do I bring Read more
Joy Garnett Lectures on Painting, Mass Media, and the Art of Fair Use
What did Jackson Pollock intend when he painted Lavender Mist? Cariou v. Prince, and the importance of scripting the artist’s words.
Patrick Cariou’s lawyers have filed their brief (embedded below) in opposition to Richard Prince’s appeal of the decision holding that Prince’s appropriation’s of Cariou’s photographs constituted copyright infringement. Writing in artnet, Rachel Corbett explains, among other things, that Cariou’s legal team is banking largely on the claim that Prince’s work failed to comment on or satirize Cariou’s photographs — a common objection against applying the fair use exception to copyright law. Read more
Part home, part musical instrument — NOLA’s Music Box
From NPR.org, In The Music Box, New Orleans Residents Hear Hope: When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, it left behind a city full of destroyed homes. Despite ongoing rebuilding efforts, thousands of blighted properties remain. Now, a group of artists is creating a structure that is part home, part musical instrument and part inspiration of what can be made of these damaged properties. The Music Box is a small Read more
The motion picture and music industries won’t give up trying to protect their money-making models even if they are obsolete.
Bill McGeveran in the Guardian makes clear that the film and music industries aren’t going to go away, but that there are ways to to address legitimate copyright concerns without PIPA and SOPA’s utter inadequacies: At the end of a Hollywood blockbuster, when the vanquished villain declares that he should have won and that we haven’t seen the last of him, we all know what it means: the sequel is Read more
Building knowledge in the digital age; the transition continues — science this time.
I have made the point on this blog that the digitization of information and the internet have made the old ways of doing business with information (be it entertainment, news, science, or art) obsolete and that efforts to force the new media into legal forms that evolved with the ways businesses had organized the old technologies are doomed to failure or to killing the innovation those laws are supposed to Read more
Clay Shirky on why SOPA & PIPA won’t go away: the old media companies want to make it too expensive for you (artist, consumer, teacher, etc.) to use copies even in legitimate ways
Saturday Night’s Music Mashup: Kota Ezawa – “Beatles: California Über Alles”
Saturday Night at the Mashup Movies: Negativland, “No Other Possibility”
Off Book: The Evolution of Music Online (a/k/a progress SOPA would end)
Off Book: The Evolution of Music Online from PBS Arts on Vimeo.
The Evolution Control Committee will sue you if you listen to their new album, but at least they can host a Saturday night horror flick they’ve mashed together the soundtrack for.
From the Evolution Control Committee, which :”began in 1986 and continues to risk millions in copyright violation fines for what The ECC calls ‘music’”: We’re very pleased to announce that our new album is now finally and officially released! All Rights Reserved is now available as a double CD, on vinyl, or download. It’s just a shame you can’t listen to it. “The lawyers had concerns,” ECC’s TradeMark Gunderson explains. Read more
Ray Johnson, dead 17 years ago today: “I have simply had to accept the fact that out of a life necessity I have written a lot of letters, and given away a lot of material and information, and it has been a compulsion.”
Guy Bleus: Mail-Art is an international network of hundreds of artists who apply communicationmedia as artmedia. It concerns networkers or mail-artists who distribute their work primarily via mail, and less or not via galeries and museums. Through the years thousands (sometimes 50.000 is mentioned) of artists and non-artists have participated to this artistic movement. Ray Johnson once got the historical titel of “Father of Mail-Art” and that will always remain. Read more
Why would any musician give away his music for free?
Have you ever known a Dead Head? Do you know any other band with such a devoted following? Did you know that it has been said that the Dead “may be the most profitable rock band in history.” Do you think that’s possible for a band that never had a #1 song or a #1 album and had only 2 songs ever that cracked the Top 40? Maybe the money Read more
John Oswald, pioneer of the aural collage: the futility of law in the face of technology it cannot control.
I’ve written at length in this blog about compositions consisting of digital remixes of pre-recorded samples and the contentious and utterly unresolved tensions between copyright, fair use, and the extra-legal reality of practices that cannot be controlled by legal rules. I’ve written about artists as varied as Negativland, Girl Talk, Steinski, and Kutiman, among others. Negativland and Steinski were pioneers in the genre, composing their aural collages back in the ancient days before Read more
Creativity? YOU CAN’T HANDLE CREATIVITY!
In a study out of Cornell University, The Bias Against Creativity: The Reason People Desire But Reject Creative Ideas, the authors point out that creative responses to problems create uncertainty, and that people reject those creative ideas because they can’t handle the uncertainty: Although the positive associations with creativity are typically the focus of attention both among scholars and practitioners, the negative associations may also be activated when people evaluate Read more
New Year’s Eve Remix: DJ Earworm’s United States of Pop 2011: World Go Boom
Steinski: The Motorcade Sped On (for November 22)
On Veterans Day, someone else’s story about my dad.
I’ve been told my best writing is the writing I do about my father. Well, Jerri Donahue does a pretty good job of it too. The whole story is worth reading, but this is how it starts: As he awaited capture, Sydney “Skip” Friedman saw Jewish GIs switch their dog tags for those of dead comrades. The 20-year old from Shaker Heights kept his tags stamped with “H” for “Hebrew.” Read more