Peter Friedman
Lawyer
Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity
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
The film, music, and publishing industries have always cried, “Wolf!”
I’ve written before about how the film industry decried and fought the VCR. In 1982, Jack Valenti, in sworn testimony before Congress, stated that “the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.” Of course, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the VCR and the film industry not only prospered; it makes more money from home video sales Read more
An Introduction to Copyright, Fair Use, and Appropriation Art, Part 1
In September, I spoke at SPACES on copyright and art, an opportunity that I used to go introduce copyright and fair use and the contentious issues that remain entirely unresolved in connection with appropriation art. I had an opportunity to give a similar talk last week at Wooster College. You can see my presentation here. But the presentation, obviously, is only the starting point of a talk, so I thought Read more
Originality relies on a good deal of imitation and even a bit of theft — Picasso this time.
James Polchin, Cezanne, Michelangelo, and Greek sculpture in Picasso’s early drawings: To look at Picasso’s drawings is to better understand his paintings as something greater than Picasso, an artistic vision based on imitation and purloined art. If we look beyond the artist, we might actually see his art and access his creative process without the shadow and burden of Picasso’s name getting in the way. We might call what Picasso Read more
The principle of collage is the central principle of all art.
No one who has spent more than a few days reading this blog in its 3+ years can have missed the fact that I have been strongly persuaded that the common notion of authorship — that true artists are solitary originating geniuses — is a myth. Kenneth Smith, in “It’s Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It’s ‘Repurposing,’” adresses the same issues and covers much of the same ground, but Read more
PBF on the interrelationships between law, technology, and the arts on 9/15
On September 15 at 6pm I’ll be speaking at SPACES on the interrelationships of art, law, and technology. SPACES is a gallery, a resource, and a public forum for artists who explore and experiment. To find it, go here. There will some minor similarities, I suppose, to the talk I gave at the Cleveland Institute of Art two years ago, but this one promises to be significantly different and better.
The Barnes Foundation and Ownership: Outsmarting Albert Barnes
James Panero sets forth the historical detail on Albert Barnes and his foundation, much discussed on this blog, in his article Outstmarting Albert Barnes: All in all, the same brilliance that created a legacy for Albert Barnes would ultimately undo his legacy. Since the time of Barnes’ death in an automobile accident in 1951, the Barnes Foundation has been a case study in how an institution, created by a brilliant Read more