Peter Friedman
Lawyer
Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity
Girl Talk: If they passed out paints on the street for free, I’m sure there’d be a lot more painters.
They’re trying to make it illegal for you to respond to the imagery your bombarded with every day.
From NEWSgrist comes the sad news of Mike Kelley’s death, along with a very interesting interview of Kelley conducted by Glenn O’Brien. An excerpt: GO:?I’ve remembered an event and thought I’d said something when actually it was somebody else who said it or vice versa. I think, especially in writing, so much of plagiarism is completely unconscious. MK:?I have experienced that often. I’ve stolen ideas, and people have stolen from Read more
Mount Washington Railroad, New Hampshire (c. 1870)
The Beach Boys: Villains, just see what you’ve done.
One of the oddest points to get across to non-lawyers, lawyers-to-be, and even many lawyers is that what the law prescribes and what actually happens are 2 entirely different things and that it is as crucial to being a good lawyer to understand what actually happens and why as it is to know the laws. It starts out pretty simply with beginning law students. The first time someone says, “But Read more
Dickie Goodman & Bill Buchanan: The Flying Saucer — the first hit mashup and its legacy
Buchanan & Goodman – The Flying Saucer (Parts 1 & 2) (mp3) Chuck Miller on the first controversial hit recording using samples of other songs: [I]n June 1956, [Dickie] Goodman came up with an idea. “Bill Buchanan and I were writing some songs at the time,” said Goodman in a print interview, “trying to break into the business. We were sitting around and suddenly we got an idea. How would Read more
Michalis Pichler: Statements on Appropriation (2009)
Michalis Pichler: Statements on Appropriation (2009) 1. if a book paraphrases one explicit historical or contemporary predecessor in title, style and/or content, this technique is what I would call a “greatest hit” 2. Maybe the belief that an appropriation is always a conscious strategic decision made by an author is just as naive as believing in an “original” author in the first place. 3. It appears to me, that the signature of Read more
Saturday Night Mashup: Beatles — Revolution Number Nine
Saturday Night Mashup: The Timelords/KLF — Doctorin’ the Tardis
In loving memory of an American classic
Kota Ezawa, Slide 2006
Another thought on stating artistic intentions
Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said at all can be said clearly. But not everything that can be thought can be said.
– Ludwig Wittengstein
Richard Prince 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