Julianna Yau’s blog

Last Sunday, I was at the Copy Cats panel discussion hosted by Trinity Square Video in Toronto. The panel featured Johanna Householder, Jonathan Culp, Laura J. Murray and Jonathan Sommer. The discussion was very well attended (standing-room only for late-comers!), and the panelists provided a mixture of personal experience and legal background on appropriation in video art.

Johanna talked about the importance of appropriation as an artistic practise, noting that most artists who creatively reuse works do so because they love the original work. Jonathan C. later echoed this sentiment, and talked about the fact that he appropriates pop culture in his work because he is surrounded by it and is informed by it. Jonathan C. said that he was “scrounging from pop culture”, whereas Johanna mentioned the likeness of readymades and appropriation.

One of the points Johanna mentioned is one which has come up time and time again: the need to distinguish between artists’ use of art and non-artists’ use of art. I think there is general consensus that non-artists’ use of art (e.g. a company using a painting in their advertisements) needs to come with proper financial renumeration. Artists’ use of other artists’ work is more of a grey area, and from what I’ve been hearing, the problem isn’t that the artist who is practising appropriation doesn’t want to either pay for the use of the work or credit the other artist. The problem with being able to credit the original artist is that tracking down artists is often a daunting task, and the problem with paying the copyright owner is that it is difficult to license the material (particularly if it’s corporately owned).

Johnathan C. asked why we treat quoting/critiquing differently in print and other visual media (e.g. video). I think this is an excellent question, but it lands itself perfectly in the good ‘ol grey zone because the ratio of quoted to original work is much different in an artistically created critique than a textual one. Although there are textual equivalents to the type of work resulting in appropriation which often happens in film, I think it happens much less frequently (I may be wrong, though…I’m not as in tune with this as I’d like to be).

Johnathan S. provided us with a crash-course on copyright, and I was surprised by how few artists were already aware of the details of copyright law and how it applies to them. It always distresses me when I’m reminded of artists focusing so disproportionately more on their creative practise than on the more mundane things like copyright, finances and other administrative tasks.

Some of the information Johnathan S. shared which were new to me are:

• although the constitution is supposed to be the primary legal document, in practise, constitution doesn’t trump copyright act
• being able to articulate what was done when appropriating is wholly important if you ever go to court
• courts have identified that copyright is not a natural right

Laura gave the audience an overview of what has been happening with copyright in the political realm recently. Again, much of this was not news to me because of how closely I’ve been following copyright in the past few years. She then outlined what she thought were some changes we would want to see in the Copyright Act, rather than all the things we don’t want to see:

• broadening of fair dealing; movement toward fair use... more general statements about what is covered ~~> wouldn’t that leave the door open for the law being created purely based on case law?
• CCH –> clearer explanations of how fair dealing works
• attribution –> knowing where something comes from; add condition that attribution is done where possible
• set schedule to pay for use of work if copyright owner not found (to be paid if later found)
• penalty for copyright misuse

I wonder whether the movement toward fair use would actually accomplish what we want. It seems it may be a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other.

In the instance of attribution only being done where possible, the “where possible” clause may cause many heated debates of what that really means. Finding the original creator of a work has been an issue which is increasingly appeared in discussions of copyright. What I and others are starting to see is the need and possibility of a searchable database of art—something which new technologies is making more realistic.

The overall feeling I got from Copy Cats was that the same discussions are being recycled. This may not necessarily be a bad thing, considering there is so much education/awareness work yet to be done on appropriation and copyright in general. But it seems like those of us who are in the thick of things have gotten to the point where we need to start finding and creating solutions, rather than simply complaining about the problems.

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