Copyright Law

More Stolen Picassos

Posted on February 08, 2008
The BBC reports:"Two paintings by Pablo Picasso have been stolen from a Swiss exhibition. The artworks were stolen on Wednesday after closing time at the show of the artist's work in the small town of Pfaeffikon, near Zurich. The oil paintings - Head of Horse and Glass and Pitcher - were on loan from the Sprengel Museum in Germany...

Bribery Charge

Posted on February 07, 2008
Bloomberg's Philip Boroff reports that "New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has accused the former superintendent of the state-owned Manhattan armory where the [Pulse contemporary-art] fair was held last year of extorting money from organizers and soliciting a bribe...

Penn Portraits

Posted on February 07, 2008
An interesting bit of information from Randy Kennedy's story in today's New York Times about the Getty's acquisition of Irving Penn's entire "Small Trades" series, 252 portraits of blue-collar workers ? "waiters, bakers, butchers, rag-and-bone men":"Weston Naef, the Getty?s senior photography curator, said that the museum had been working to acquire the series for more than five years, but the sticking point had been copyright ownership of the images...

No Fisk Delay

Posted on February 07, 2008
Lee Rosenbaum reports that the court has rejected the Attorney General's request (discussed earlier here) to delay the Fisk trial to allow further development of a proposal for sharing its collection with the forthcoming Museum of African American Music, Art and Culture in Nashville...

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Remington Trademark Lawsuit

Posted on February 06, 2008
Forbes reports on a trademark dispute involving the Frederic Remington Art Museum. Apparently an entity called the Frederic Remington Trust 1861 LCC "acquired a federal trademark in 1995 for the use of the name Frederic Remington on a variety of products, including eyeglasses, carbonated apple cider, umbrellas, cologne, clothing and cigarette cases...

Randolph Update

Posted on February 06, 2008
Christa Desrets has the latest on the Randolph College deaccessioning lawsuit in the Lynchburg News & Advance. At a hearing Tuesday the court "agreed to narrowing the scope of the case [to just the four paintings at issue], and said the trial could be delayed for up to six weeks from its original starting date on April 29...

"He invokes the law of the street ? finders keepers, losers weepers"

Posted on February 06, 2008
In the news today, a Warhol dollar-sign painting recovered almost a decade after it was stolen from a SoHo gallery. The New York Times story is here.The story hints that, unlike the typical recovered work scenario (which pits an innocent third-party purchaser against the victim of the theft), here the current owner may not have the cleanest of hands: it notes "some odd coincidences" in the case, including that the current owner, "a man who has admittedly lived a hard-knock life," was "raised on Broome Street a few blocks from the gallery ...

Salander Protocol

Posted on February 06, 2008
Bloomberg's Philip Boroff (who owns the Salander bankruptcy beat) reports that the gallery?s chief restructuting officer has proposed ?a process to enable owners of the 4,000 artworks held at the New York gallery and its warehouses to retrieve their property...

"His articulated artistic justifications for his juxtapositions make the transformative and critical nature of his copying evident"

Posted on February 05, 2008
Rebecca Tushnet writes about the work of painter Russell Connor.

Is a photograph of a sculpture a "derivative work"?

Posted on February 05, 2008
Bill Patry says no:"Photographs of other objects are not derivative works of those objects. First, a photograph of an object is not 'based on' that object: It is a mere depiction of it. Second, even if one were to find that a photograph of an object is based on that 'preexisting work' within the meaning of the definition of 'derivative work' in Section 101, such a photograph must still 'recast, transform, or adapt' the authorship in the preexisting work to be considered a derivative work...

Fisk Follies

Posted on February 04, 2008
Lee Rosenbaum has been following the latest developments in the Fisk-O'Keeffe saga. Apparently the Tennessee Attorney General has asked for a delay in the proceedings in order to allow time for further exploration of a new plan to keep the university's Stieglitz Collection in Nashville through some sort of partnership with the (not yet existing) Museum of African American Music, Art and Culture...

Trafficking in tax deductions?

Posted on February 04, 2008
An article in today's New York Times suggests that the Southern California antiquities scandal may really be about the sale of tax deductions:"Applications for the warrants said under the scheme, that smugglers and art dealers were selling prehistoric artifacts to Americans, who were provided with inflated appraisals...

Fisk Delay?

Posted on January 31, 2008
The AP reports that the Tennessee attorney general has asked Chancellor Lyle to delay the February trial to determine whether Fisk University can go ahead with its proposed deal with the Crystal Bridges Museum: "The request ... asks [Lyle] to push the trial back to late June due to a proposal by Fisk to raise funds from federal and private sources...

Law in Art

Posted on January 29, 2008
Bloomberg's James Russell reviews Rafael Vinoly's new courthouse in the Bronx.

Widening (UPDATED)

Posted on January 29, 2008
From today's Los Angeles Times:"A federal investigation into looted Asian antiquities at Southland museums has broadened to include a prominent Chicago industrialist and art collector who purchased hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of allegedly stolen artifacts from a Cerritos arts dealer...

Archives Theft

Posted on January 29, 2008
The New York Times has a story today on a longtime employee at the New York State Archives in Albany who has been charged with stealing and selling rare books and documents from the state?s collections since 2002. He reportedly confessed to taking "more than 300 or 400 items in 2007 alone," selling them on eBay and at trade shows...

Theft-to-order

Posted on January 28, 2008
A suspect in last month's theft of two paintings from the Sao Paulo Museum of Art has told investigators that the paintings were destined for a Saudi collector. AP story here.

Today's Salander News

Posted on January 28, 2008
Philip Boroff has the latest:"RFR Realty LLC, controlled by developer and art collector Aby Rosen, has asked [the Salander] bankruptcy judge to give it possession of the 1922 neo-Italian Renaissance mansion that Salander-O'Reilly leases. In court papers, RFR said the gallery's late rent payments triggered the landlord's option to terminate the lease...

Jewelry Suit

Posted on January 27, 2008
Josh Baer reports:"Barber Bros Jewelry filed suit this week against Sotheby?s for $800,000 alleging negligence for the loss of their jewelry."

MFA Suit

Posted on January 26, 2008
I recently took note of the beginnings of a trend whereby museums and other institutions were going on offense and seeking declaratory judgments against potential restitution claimants, rather than sitting around waiting to be sued. Today's New York Times has the latest example:"The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has turned to the courts to validate its claim to a 1913 Oskar Kokoschka painting sought by Claudia Seger-Thomschitz, an Austrian woman who says it was sold under duress during the Nazi occupation of Austria ...

"Confirming our suspicion that there is a bit of art in law . . ."

Posted on January 26, 2008
Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento points to this law.com article on the ins and outs of redacting documents in pretrial discovery.

More on 475 Kent

Posted on January 26, 2008
From Ed Winkleman.

Complicity

Posted on January 26, 2008
In my post yesterday on the California antiquities raids, I mentioned a quote from Lee Rosenbaum: "This may well turn out to be an ART-MARKET scandal, but the degree of intentional complicity by MUSEUMS in this mess is not yet known."Well, today's New York Times has a story headlined "Museum Workers are Called Complicit," which says: "Affidavits related to search warrants executed at four Southern California museums on Thursday say that staff members at two of the four museums worked closely with the main targets of the investigation, visiting a storage locker maintained by a smuggler of stolen antiquities and meeting with the sellers of stolen goods ? even while acknowledging that the artifacts headed for the museums might be tainted...

More Museum Raid

Posted on January 25, 2008
Tons more coverage of yesterday's raid on four California museums. Here is the Los Angeles Times. The New York Times is here. Newsweek is here. The Orange County Register talks to "the man identified as 'the smuggler'" in the investigation.Lee Rosenbaum cautions that "the degree of intentional complicity by museums in this mess is not yet known...

"A glimpse of the daily struggle in New York to keep space available for artists"

Posted on January 25, 2008
I've been meaning to mention the goings-on at 475 Kent Ave. in Williamsburg, where a number of artists were "evacuated" earlier this week by city officials over fire safety concerns involving an unauthorized matzo bakery in the basement. The New York Times had a story here...

Museums Raided

Posted on January 24, 2008
From the Los Angeles Times:"Federal agents carried out coordinated raids on four Southern California museums and a Los Angeles art gallery early today, the first public move in a five-year investigation of an alleged smuggling pipeline that authorities say funneled looted Southeast Asian and Native American artifacts into local museums...

"Now, artist Michael Hermesh is being compensated for the rough handling of Frank and his baggage"

Posted on January 23, 2008
From the CBC: "The City of Penticton will have to pay $14,000 in damages to the creator of Frank the Baggage Handler, a contentious local statue that drew international headlines after vandals repeatedly damaged its male genitalia."You can see Frank here.

Pyramid Scheme

Posted on January 23, 2008
National Geographic News has more on Egypt's plans to bring a number of antiquities, including the Pyramids, under copyright protection. The article includes the following from Bill Patry:"'You can do it within your own borders if your own laws permit you to do it,' Patry said of copyrighting property thousands of years old...

More Theft Fallout

Posted on January 21, 2008
Looks like the Sao Paulo Museum of Art might be temporarily closed in the wake of last month's high-profile robbery:"[S]tate authorities have filed a court request calling for the museum to be shut down because it has been operating over the past 40 years without formal permission from the city, police and fire services...

"To burn or not to burn?"

Posted on January 21, 2008
Here's a real life example of the right-to-destroy issue discussed a while back here, here, and here. "It's the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed?as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died...

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