Who Owns Villa La Pietra? The Story of A Family, their Home, and an American University under Italian Law

In 1994 Harold Acton, son of Arthur Acton, an English art dealer in Florence, and Hortense Mitchell Acton, an American banking heiress, donated his family home, Villa La Pietra, to New York University. Today, this Tuscan villa is at the center of a declaration of paternity lawsuit and a claim of inheritance brought by Liana Beacci, Arthur Acton\u27s daughter by his Italian secretary. In this Note, Felicia Caponigri presents the facts of the case, focusing on the provenance of the Villa, and the procedural posture of the case. Caponigri applies Italian law to argue that New York University might claim clear title to the Villa if Hortense\u27s father gave her the Villa, or if Hortense set up a legal entity in which she placed title to Villa La Pietra. Caponigri also argues the Beacci might have a colorable claim if Hortense and Arthur Acton acquired the Villa together

The Ethics of the International Display of Fashion in the Museum

First, the article engages with the crucial question of how fashion is cultural heritage, or, at least, how fashion can be considered a part of the ICOM Code’s definition of heritage, and therefore within the scope of the minimum ethical standards it sets forth for its members and potentially for museums at large. Second, the article presents the ICOM Code, contextualizing it within the ICOM’s framework as a nongovernmental international public interest organization, and examines how the ICOM Code is a source of general principles of international law. As part of this section, the article also highlights how one of the ICOM Code’s ethical standards—that the museum’s interest should prevail in the face of a conflict of interest between the museum and an individual—is seemingly becoming a rule of customary international law. In its fourth and fifth sections, the article enters the museum space and analyzes specific fashion exhibits and displays. (footnotes omitted

Fashion\u27s Brand Heritage, Cultural Heritage, and the Piracy Paradox

This Article explores the role that heritage has on our understanding of the appropriateness of intellectual property protection for fashion designs in light of Christopher Sprigman and Kal Raustiala’s seminal work in The Piracy Paradox. At times, heritage seems to both reinforce Sprigman and Raustiala’s argument that fashion thrives in a low-IP regime and, at other times, heritage challenges that argument. Taking Italian fashion design as a case study, this Article considers the intersection of brand heritage, cultural heritage, and intellectual property law and makes three central observations. First, that fashion designs reflecting brand heritage thrive in a low-IP regime. Second, that fashion designs might only benefit from a higher-IP regime in instances where we understand fashion designs not as brand heritage alone, but as part of a wider cultural heritage. Finally, understanding the relationship between copyright law and cultural heritage law is central to exploring how a higher-IP regime might benefit fashion designs today

Summary Report of Conference on "A new perspective on the protection of cultural property through criminal law"

On February 3rd and 4th of 2017, the Council of Europe, the Italian Ministry of Justice and the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism organized the conference, "A new perspective on the protection of cultural property through criminal law", at the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy to discuss the drafting and future implementation of the "Convention on Offences Relating to Cultural Property". The following is a summary report of the conference sessions, in addition to separate recommendations inspired by the conference contributions

Selective organic functionalization of polycrystalline silicon-germanium for bioMEMS applications

AbstractWe selectively immobilized organofunctional silanes on top of polycrystalline silicon-germanium (poly-SiGe) layers, as a first step towards the fabrication of poly-SiGe-based bioMEMS (biomedical MicroElectroMechanicalSystems) by means of standard UV photolithography. 3-aminopropyl-dimethyl-ethoxysilane (APDMES) and 3-aminopropyl-triethoxysilane (APTES) molecules were immobilized onto resist-patterned poly-SiGe surfaces. The protocols for surface hydroxylation and silane immobilization were designed to be CMOS-compatible and to avoid damage to photoresist. Silanized surfaces were investigated both by means of fluorescence microscopy, and by FEG-SEM observation after labeling with 30 nm-diameter gold nanoparticles (NPs). We report the silanization protocols, together with the results indicating successful organic functionalization of the samples

Fashion design objects as cultural property in Italy and in the United States

This dissertation identifies a question which is undervalued, underexplored, and under-asked within the complex of laws that apply to fashion and in legal scholarship exploring fashion: how are fashion design objects cultural property? It answers this question by looking to modern and contemporary Italian fashion design objects as a case study, primarily because the history of Italian fashion, the current activities of Italian fashion brands, and Italian cultural property law provide ready examples and tools through which to answer the question. Bypassing the more common question of whether fashion is art, the dissertation asks how fashion design objects might be of historic, artistic, or other cultural interest for the public under the law such that they may be preserved and valorized like other cultural properties. The first chapter gives a history of Italian fashion, spotlighting relevant key historical moments and constant tensions through Italian fashion history, including the complex nature of Italian fashion as both local and global, the relationship between traditional Italian craftsmanship and Italian brands and designers, the inspirational links between Italian cultural heritage and Italian fashion, and the almost inseparable links between intangible design and tangible properties. The second chapter examines the dilemmas surrounding the definition of cultural property under Italian cultural property law both throughout history and today – a boundless cultural interest, mechanisms of time, and an emphasis on things. This chapter also explores the relationship between Italian cultural property law and copyright in light of cultural property law’s rules on reproductions and its regulation of decoro. The links between intangibility and tangibility in the legal definition of cultural property under Italian cultural property law and the work of legal scholars which explains cultural property law with reference to text provide the groundwork for an exploration in the third chapter of how certain texts, despite usually being identified as intangible and therefore outside the proverbial cultural property “box”, may be tangible and therefore cultural property. Such an exploration is fruitful for how fashion design objects are cultural property since fashion design is often conceived of as intangible like text and may also incorporate text. The third chapter gives examples of text on a spectrum of intangibility and tangibility, with corresponding examples of fashion design. It crafts a standard for when and how fashion design objects might be cultural property or not. In addition to facilitating a test for when fashion design objects may be cultural property under cultural property law, this spectrum also provides an opportunity for new comparisons between cultural property and intellectual property, and more specifically between cultural property and copyright and their corresponding legal regimes. This comparison is explored in chapter four, which recaps the spectrum of cultural property in terms of tangible text, visible images, intangible text or intangible images, and testaments having the value of civilization. The chapter examines conceptual separability in U.S. copyright law in particular with reference to this spectrum and the recent U.S. Supreme Court case, Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands, to show how conceptual separability seems, for the category of designs of useful articles eligible for inclusion in the category of pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works, to be about identifying a possible public cultural interest in intangible parts of tangible objects, in fashion designs which are like visible images. In this sense, the dissertation envisions closer ties between copyright law and cultural property law and sees copyright as an at times ex ante cultural property regime. Chapter five explores how the history of certain historic preservation laws in the United States might allow for a future inclusion of fashion design objects as part of historic property and acknowledges that certain parts of Art Law and other sui generis norms may protect fashion design objects as cultural property. The dissertation suggests that while some fashion design objects can be currently included as cultural property under cultural property law, others cannot. Copyright may play a key role in the protection of fashion design objects as cultural property, both when these fashion design objects can and cannot be classified as cultural property under the law. These links suggest that protecting fashion design objects as cultural property and allowing this protection to inform the nature of fashion designs as copyrightable subject matter might result in a thin just as much as a thick copyright. Beyond cultural heritage law is an emerging field for the protection of fashion design objects as cultural property which will require considerations of how other legal regimes overlap with cultural property law as applied to fashion design objects, and the duties and obligations that members of the fashion industry have in protecting their fashion products as cultural property so as not to risk losing the cultural significance of fashion design objects for the future