A Balance of Interests: the Concordance of Copyright Law and Moral Rights in the Worldwide Economy

LECTURE IN INTERNAL MEDICINE PROPAEDEUTIC

Payment in Credit: Copyright Law and Subcultural Creativity

Copyright lawyers talk and write a lot about the uncertainties of fair use and the deterrent effects of a clearance culture on publishers, teachers, filmmakers, and the like, but know less about the choices people make about copyright on a daily basis, especially when they are not working. Here, Tushnet examines one subcultural group that engages in a variety of practices, from pure copying and distribution of others\u27 works to creation of new stories, art, and audiovisual works: the media-fan community. Among other things, she discusses some differences between fair use and fan practices, focused around attribution as an alternative to veto rights over uses of copyrighted works

When Stuff Becomes Art: The Protection of Contemporary Art Through the Elimination of VARA’s Public-Presentation Exception

The Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA) grants an artist the broad power to “prevent any intentional distortion, mutilation, or other modification of the work which would be prejudicial to [the artist’s] honor or reputation.” This right is significantly circumscribed, however, by VARA’s public-presentation exception, which states that a modification “which is the result . . . of the public presentation, including lighting and placement, of the work is not a destruction, distortion, mutilation, or other modification” that would otherwise violate VARA. This Note argues that the public-presentation exception is injudicious in light of the rise of the contemporary art movement. Much more than artists of earlier movements, contemporary artists rely on precise arrangement of elements and engagement with the physical space surrounding these elements in the creation of a work of art. Yet it is control over those critical contextual elements, arguably the most critical element of a contemporary work, that VARA explicitly denies to the contemporary artist. The public-presentation exception threatens more than just the personal interests of artists—a greater societal interest in preserving authentic cultural heritage for future generations is continually undermined as long as the public-presentation exception remains codified in VARA. Lasting protection of the integrity of works of contemporary art thus requires the elimination of the public-presentation exception

Honor and Destruction: The Conflicted Object in Moral Rights Law

In 1990, the Copyright Act was amended to name visual artists, alone among protected authors, possessors of moral rights, a set of non-economic intellectual property rights originating in nineteenth-century Europe. Although enhancing authors\u27 rights in a user-oriented system was a novel undertaking, it was rendered further anomalous by the statute\u27s designated class, given copyright\u27s longstanding alliance with text. And although moral rights epitomize the legacy of the Romantic author as a cultural trope embedded in the law, American culture offered little to support or explain the apparent privileging of visual artists over other authors. What, if not a legal or cultural disposition toward visual artists, precipitated the enactment of a moral rights statute like the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (\u27\u27VARA )? This Article demonstrates that the answer is less related to authorship concerns than would reasonably be surmised from a doctrine premised on the theory that a creative work embodies the author\u27s honor, personhood, and even soul