Julianna Yau’s blog

On Tuesday, Cory Doctorow had an article published in the Guardian Unlimited arguing that [a]n exhibition of pop art at London’s National Portrait Gallery unwittingly celebrates a golden age before copyright was king. The article was brought to my attention through the Art Law Blog, and reading it posed many questions.

Firstly, Doctorow points out what could be seen as copyright hypocrisy on the part of the Pop Art Portraits project, or London’s National Portrait Gallery in general. Essentially, he argues that the portraits are employing creative reuse of existing work, presumably in violation of the copyrights of the primary works holders, but the National Portrait Gallery prohibits photography to protect the copyrights of the works on display.

I say presumably because although their programme does not say a word about copyright, this does not necessarily mean that the artists have used the work without compensation to the original artists, or that they necessarily need to (depending on various fair use issues). To my knowledge, it is not a general practise to include information regarding who has been paid copyright residuals in the programme for a show.

That being said, I would hope that copyright has been paid where appropriate, but doubt it. Mostly because I know the administrative web that needs to be untangled to clear all the copyrights for using anything in a magazine is complex and time-consuming. And I doubt Disney would allow the use of any of their characters for a price affordable by an artist or a publicly funded gallery.

Secondly, there is the whole issue of how much copyright enforcement is too much. That I’m not prepared to tackle right at this time, but it seems that excessive copyright enforcement is a combination of legitimate copyright concerns, a disregard for fair use and a dash of desire for censorship/control. The concept of copyright in itself is not a negative thing, but we certainly need to revisit the terms of copyright and the methods and extent of enforcement happening recently.

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