NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Found Art (Chelsea): Unmonumental 11

Found Art (Chelsea): Unmonumental 11, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

 

Found Art (LES): Unmonumental 10

Found Art (LES): Unmonumental 10, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

 

Found Art (LES): Unmonumental 9

Found Art (LES): Unmonumental 9, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

 

Bordering on Debord's Board Game (or, Professor Accused of Infringing Copyright of Man Who Opposed Copyright)

KRIEGSPIEL
Guy Debord's 1978 "Game of War"
Produced for computer by RSG
Screen shot courtesy of m.river, flickr.com

via WaterCoolerGames:

Wark on Debord
April 15, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Following our coverage of the legal flap around Alex Galloway's digital adaptation of Guy Debord's Game of War, McKenzie Wark (author of the excellent book Gamer Theory) has published a short, thoughtful essay on Debord's original. The piece is forthcoming in Wark's new book project, 50 Years of Recuperation: The Situationist International 1957-1972.

via post.thing.net and interactivist info exchange, 04/23/2008:
{additional links courtesy of newsgrist}

Guy Debord's Widow Threatens NYU Professor with Copyright Violation Professor Is Accused of Infringing the Copyright of a Man Who Opposed Copyright

By ANDREA L. FOSTER, http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i33/33a01603.htm

Guy Debord, a Marxist philosopher who died in 1994, was no fan of private property. But apparently his widow is one.

A lawyer representing the widow, Alice Becker-Ho, has threatened Alexander R. Galloway, an associate professor of culture and communication at New York University, with legal action. Mr. Galloway says the lawyer has sent him a letter demanding that he stop distributing his online war game, which the lawyer says infringes a copyright held by the Debord estate. The French philosopher had created a similar board game 30 years ago.

But copyrights and some forms of intellectual property were anathema to Debord, says Mr. Galloway. The Situationist International movement, which Debord founded, in 1957, is a mix of anarchism and Marxism. Its followers scrawled "Abolish copyright" on walls during the May 1968 student uprisings in Paris.

The humor in defending the property rights of Debord, a Marxist, has not been lost on scholars, who have publicized the case on their blogs.

Mr. Galloway does not deny that the two-person computer game he developed is based on Debord's creation, the Game of War. The philosopher, an avid student of war strategy, released a few handcrafted copies of the board game in 1978. The object of the game, which resembles chess, is to corner and destroy opposing pieces. Debord and his wife wrote a book about it that was translated into English last year.

<Image via, tirée du film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, Guy Debord, 1978.

One of Debord's games, cast in silver and copper, is on display at Columbia University's Buell Center for the Study of Architecture, alongside Mr. Galloway's computer version, called Kriegspiel. The object of Kriegspiel, German for a generic 18th-century war game, is the same as in Debord's game.

A computer programmer, Mr. Galloway says he spent about a year designing the digital game, which can be downloaded from the Web at no charge. "It's part of my scholarly research into how antagonism is simulated in war games and computer games," he said. "It's also part of my research into the work of Debord."

Despite the similarities between his creation and Debord's, Mr. Galloway disagrees that he is breaking the law. "I don't think I'm infringing on anyone's copyright in the creation of this game," he says, declining to discuss his legal situation further.

John Beckman, a spokesman for New York University, says only that it received a similar cease-and-desist letter and has responded.

Wendy M. Seltzer, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for
Internet & Society, is familiar with Mr. Galloway's case. The Debord estate, she says, is overreaching in accusing him of copyright infringement.

The idea for a game is not copyrightable, she argues; only the image of a game is. Mr. Galloway's game uses the idea of Debord's game, she says, but does not duplicate its artistry and detail. {note: this perfectly illustrates the Idea-Expression Dichotomy }

Ms. Seltzer, a visiting assistant professor at Northeastern University School of Law, sees similarities between Mr. Galloway's case and one involving the Facebook-based word game Scrabulous. In that case, the owners of the board game Scrabble have accused the developers of Scrabulous of infringing their copyright. Ms. Seltzer says that claim, too, is without merit.

Burmese Junta Remains Insane, Even As Death Toll Rises

Photo: Rapport, for The New York Times
Hhaing The Yu, 29, in rain falling on the ruins of his home, in a township outside Yangon, Myanmar, on Sunday. Officials are expressing worry about disease.

Concerns Over Myanmar Junta's Role
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: May 14, 2008

YANGON, Myanmar - Further deliveries of small-scale aid arrived in Myanmar on Tuesday - a darkly clouded and rainy day in Yangon and in the south - but international aid experts and diplomats in the capital expressed concern that the Burmese government may not be up to delivering it, a task it has claimed almost exclusively as its own.

In Brussels on Tuesday, the foreign policy chief of the European Union, Javier Solana, said that if the Myanmar government continued to bar large-scale aid, outside donors should find a way to deliver it anyway.

"We have to use all the means to help those people," he said. "The United Nations charter opens some avenues if things cannot be resolved in order to get the humanitarian aid to arrive."

Ten days after the devastating cyclone struck, the isolationist military government has slightly eased its restrictions on aid but is still blocking most large-scale deliveries of relief supplies, aid officials said. Adding to the difficulties, the hundreds of thousands of people who most need help are largely in remote and inaccessible coastal and delta regions.

Myanmar's state television reported that the death toll from the May 3 cyclone had risen again, to 34,273, The Associated Press reported, with 27,838 missing. The toll has been increasing daily, as more and more of the missing are identified as dead. The United Nations has estimated that the toll could be more than 60,000.

Still, the junta was making some progress in accepting aid. Two more American relief flights landed Tuesday and United States officials said they were talking to the government about expanding the relief program. But Shari Villarosa, the top American diplomat in Myanmar, said the junta has refused the United States' offer to send in search-and-rescue teams and disaster-relief experts. The United States is conducting a military exercise together with Thailand and has 11,000 troops in the area and several ships off the coast.

Ms. Villarosa also  said the government had also rebuffed teams from China, Bangladesh, Singapore, Thailand and other countries. [read on...]

More news about Burma:

via Media Rations, Tuesday, May 13, 2008:

News from inside Burma: Than Shwe Deluded

Daily stories of the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis on the Burma coast and lowlands is leaving many of us frustrated and confused about the role that humanitarian aid can serve for the now estimated 1.5 million+ people faced with disease and starvation.

A source inside Burma, who is working with a few international and domestic aid agencies, writes to say that the situation is reaching potentially ruinous proportions and that the outcome could have a monumental affect on the political and administrative fabric of the junta-ruled country. [...]

via Washington Post:

American Admiral Takes Plea To Burma
Military Rulers Agree to Consider Major Relief Effort
By Amy Kazmin and Colum Lynch
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 13, 2008; Page A11

BANGKOK, May 12 -- The head of the U.S. Pacific Command flew into Burma on Monday aboard the first U.S. military aid flight, to press for a full-scale international relief operation for victims of Cyclone Nargis. Facing mounting international pressure to open their country's borders, Burmese officials promised to consider the request.

In New York, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed "immense frustration" with the pace of the relief effort, slowed by Burma's secretive military government. After trying for days to get top general Than Shwe on the telephone, Ban said, he sent a letter urging him to facilitate a massive aid operation. [read on...]

via BBC News, Page last updated at 14:40 GMT, Tuesday, 13 May 2008 15:40 UK:

UN calls for Burma aid corridor

                                                                

Relief for those affected by Cyclone Nargis has been slow to arrive

The United Nations has called for an air or sea corridor to be opened to channel large amounts of aid to the victims of Cyclone Nargis in Burma.

The UN's humanitarian agency said there was a risk of a "second catastrophe" unless a massive operation began.

The UN said it had only been able to reach nearly a fifth of about 1.5m people in urgent need. The official death toll has now reached 34,273.

Burma's junta is still opposed to the entry of foreign aid workers.

Vice-Admiral Soe Thein said the government was grateful for the aid shipment from the United States that arrived on Monday but insisted that "skilful humanitarian workers are not necessary". [read on...]

More via Google News...

News of China Earthquake unfolds live on Twitter

via Little Red Blog:

 

News of China Earthquake unfolds live on Twitter

by Rick Martin, China | May 12, 2008 23:03

Update: One of my Chinese friends just sent me a message: "People in Sichuan saw thousands of frogs crawling in the street, which is believed may mean something terrible." He's right. Elliot Ng points to the following picture on ifgogo:

Horrible news of a massive earthquake in Sichuan province today. For anyone who's searching for the very latest news coming out of the Chengdu area, Twitter is a good source of real-time updates.

Searching twitterlocal.net for people tweeting out of Chengdu gives the following stream of tweets (RSS). There are a few people you may want to follow: In English, inwalkedbud, lyrrael, trusip, and chengdoo.

In Chinese, ycc, est, WizarKID, and foxwoods.

Elliot Ng over at CN Reviews recommends using Summarize to search for the terms 地震 or earthquake. Similarly, you can use twifan.com to search Chinese Twitter-like sites (fanfou.com, jiwai.de) for keywords like 成都/Chengdu or 地震/earthquake.

Hope that helps anyone looking for information.

Let's all hope that those in Chengdu and surrounding areas can push though this OK. From the news that's coming in so far, things do not look good. Thoughts are with everyone down there tonight.

Robert Rauschenberg, RIP

Photo: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
The artist at his home and studio in Captiva Island, Fla. in 2005.

via NYTimes:

Robert Rauschenberg, Titan of American Art, Is Dead at 82
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: May 14, 2008

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died Monday night. He was 82.

Mr. Rauschenberg's work gave new meaning to sculpture. "Canyon," for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. "Monogram" was a stuffed Angora goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. "Bed" entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. They all became icons of postwar modernism.

A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art - not to mention between art and life.

Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.

No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture. Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, "Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look."

[read on...]

Olivier Debroise, 1952-2008

 

 

Olivier Debroise at ARCO 2005
Photo by Haupt & Binder
Universes in Universe

via ARTNET NEWS, May 12, 2008, – Jason Edward Kaufman:

OLIVIER DEBROISE, 1952-2008
Olivier Debroise, 56, a prolific scholar and curator of Mexican modern art and a key figure in the country's art world for more than three decades, died from a heart attack in Mexico City on May 6, 2008. As coordinating curator in the Department of Visual Arts at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), he had been working on plans for the university’s new contemporary art museum, designed by Teodoro González de León and scheduled to open in September.

A French citizen born in Palestine, Debroise lived in Poland, Morocco and Brazil before settling in Mexico in 1970, where he became the art critic for La Cultura en Mexico (1979-86), La Jornada (1986-94) and Reforma (2000-03). He helped found the curatorial think tank Grupo Teratoma as well as CURARE, an alternative art critics' association and magazine. He published scores of articles and books, ranging from studies of Diego Rivera in Montparnasse (1979) and Mexican art in the 1920s and 1930s (1982) to a survey of photography in Mexico (1999).

As a curator, Debroise helped integrate Mexican modern art into the international exhibition circuit, bringing a leftist political bent to numerous landmark shows, such as "Modernity and Modernization in Mexican art" at the Museo Nacional de Arte (1991), "The Bleeding Heart/El corazón sangrante" at the ICA, Boston (1991), and "David Alvaro Siqueiros: Portrait of a Decade," which traveled from Mexico City to Houston, Santa Barbara and the Whitechapel Gallery in London (1997). His curatorial projects also included the cross-border art show "InSITE97," which saw artworks installed in public places in both San Diego and Tijuana, and "The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico 1968-1997," which premiered at UNAM in 2007 and travels this year to MALBA in Buenos Aires and the Pinacoteca in São Paulo.

A wide-ranging intellectual, Debroise completed three novels, the most recent of which, Cronica de las destrucciones (1998), is a reimagining of the early post-Conquest history of Mexico. He directed the film A Banquet in Tetlapayac about Sergei Eisenstein's Qué viva Mexico. The critic and curator Cuauhtémoc Medina, who worked with Debroise on the "Discrepancies" show, describes him as "one of the most ferocious critics and curators of the art of Mexico, the inventor of the notion of the curator as a leftist cultural politician, a homosexual novelist who explored the crossroads of history, violence and desire, and an equally devastating cultural agent in demolishing myths and provoking institutional transformations."

Debroise's unexpected death shook the fractious Mexico City art world, whose leaders turned out to pay their respects at the wake and funeral, among them most of the city's museum directors, curators, foundation heads, collectors and artists, including Francis Alÿs, Melanie Smith, Thomas Glasford, Alex Navarrete and Enrique Serrano.

More via e-flux :

May 13, 2008
Olivier Debroise
(1952 - 2008): Shock Waves

Cuauhtémoc Medina

Some lives can’t fit in a single lifetime; they challenge our expectations about how many stories could possibly be provoked, contained, told and thought by a single individual. Olivier Debroise was one of the most ferocious art critics and curators in Mexico, a homosexual novelist who explored the intersections of history, violence and desire, and a cultural agent who was equally devastating in destroying myths and sustaining institutional transformations; and this is only the beginning. His death has created a massive commotion, because Debroise did not merely treat culture as his profession. He was a potent force within a multitude of critical circles that extend across disciplines, iconographic camps, academic circuits, and creative trajectories, and his loss has permanent ramifications for all those that he touched.

Tempestuous, brilliant, and tireless, Olivier Debroise was a representative of an era in which fixed concepts of identity - personal, professional, and political - lost meaning, giving way to a contemporaneity in which the past is always active, and radicalism functions without need of dogmas. In a world of organic intellectuals and fossilized academics, Olivier saw the opportunity to treat culture like an adventure series within the cycle of upsets that was the twentieth century. What follows is an incredible, though incomplete, list of the roles he played, shots he fired, and crossfire in which he was caught [read on...]

 

 

Olivier Debroise at ARCO 2005
Photo by Haupt & Binder
Universes in Universe

via ARTNET NEWS, May 12, 2008, – Jason Edward Kaufman:

OLIVIER DEBROISE, 1952-2008
Olivier Debroise, 56, a prolific scholar and curator of Mexican modern art and a key figure in the country's art world for more than three decades, died from a heart attack in Mexico City on May 6, 2008. As coordinating curator in the Department of Visual Arts at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), he had been working on plans for the university’s new contemporary art museum, designed by Teodoro González de León and scheduled to open in September.

A French citizen born in Palestine, Debroise lived in Poland, Morocco and Brazil before settling in Mexico in 1970, where he became the art critic for La Cultura en Mexico (1979-86), La Jornada (1986-94) and Reforma (2000-03). He helped found the curatorial think tank Grupo Teratoma as well as CURARE, an alternative art critics' association and magazine. He published scores of articles and books, ranging from studies of Diego Rivera in Montparnasse (1979) and Mexican art in the 1920s and 1930s (1982) to a survey of photography in Mexico (1999).

As a curator, Debroise helped integrate Mexican modern art into the international exhibition circuit, bringing a leftist political bent to numerous landmark shows, such as "Modernity and Modernization in Mexican art" at the Museo Nacional de Arte (1991), "The Bleeding Heart/El corazón sangrante" at the ICA, Boston (1991), and "David Alvaro Siqueiros: Portrait of a Decade," which traveled from Mexico City to Houston, Santa Barbara and the Whitechapel Gallery in London (1997). His curatorial projects also included the cross-border art show "InSITE97," which saw artworks installed in public places in both San Diego and Tijuana, and "The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico 1968-1997," which premiered at UNAM in 2007 and travels this year to MALBA in Buenos Aires and the Pinacoteca in São Paulo.

A wide-ranging intellectual, Debroise completed three novels, the most recent of which, Cronica de las destrucciones (1998), is a reimagining of the early post-Conquest history of Mexico. He directed the film A Banquet in Tetlapayac about Sergei Eisenstein's Qué viva Mexico. The critic and curator Cuauhtémoc Medina, who worked with Debroise on the "Discrepancies" show, describes him as "one of the most ferocious critics and curators of the art of Mexico, the inventor of the notion of the curator as a leftist cultural politician, a homosexual novelist who explored the crossroads of history, violence and desire, and an equally devastating cultural agent in demolishing myths and provoking institutional transformations."

Debroise's unexpected death shook the fractious Mexico City art world, whose leaders turned out to pay their respects at the wake and funeral, among them most of the city's museum directors, curators, foundation heads, collectors and artists, including Francis Alÿs, Melanie Smith, Thomas Glasford, Alex Navarrete and Enrique Serrano.

More via e-flux :

May 13, 2008
Olivier Debroise
(1952 - 2008): Shock Waves

Cuauhtémoc Medina

Some lives can’t fit in a single lifetime; they challenge our expectations about how many stories could possibly be provoked, contained, told and thought by a single individual. Olivier Debroise was one of the most ferocious art critics and curators in Mexico, a homosexual novelist who explored the intersections of history, violence and desire, and a cultural agent who was equally devastating in destroying myths and sustaining institutional transformations; and this is only the beginning. His death has created a massive commotion, because Debroise did not merely treat culture as his profession. He was a potent force within a multitude of critical circles that extend across disciplines, iconographic camps, academic circuits, and creative trajectories, and his loss has permanent ramifications for all those that he touched.

Tempestuous, brilliant, and tireless, Olivier Debroise was a representative of an era in which fixed concepts of identity - personal, professional, and political - lost meaning, giving way to a contemporaneity in which the past is always active, and radicalism functions without need of dogmas. In a world of organic intellectuals and fossilized academics, Olivier saw the opportunity to treat culture like an adventure series within the cycle of upsets that was the twentieth century. What follows is an incredible, though incomplete, list of the roles he played, shots he fired, and crossfire in which he was caught [read on...]

 

GOP Accidentally Adopts Anti-Depressant Slogan

via Huffington Post, May 12, 2008:

GOP's New Slogan Already Being Used To Market Anti-Depressant

Leave it to the tone deaf GOP to find a way of attaching themselves to this election cycle's "change" mandate that simultaneously reinforces the fact that their failed policies have messed up the world to such an inhuman extent that many Americans now live their daily lives in a state of free-floating panic and paralyzing anxiety.

In today's New York Times' Caucus blog, Carl Hulse reports that House Republicans have got themselves a brand-new slogan:

It looks like Republicans will counter the Democratic push for change from the years of the Bush administration with their own pledge to deliver, drum roll please, "the change you deserve." The first element of the party agenda developed over the past few months by the leadership and select party members will focus on family issues.

"Through our "Change You Deserve" message and through our "American Families Agenda," House Republicans will continue our efforts to speak directly to an American public looking for leaders who will offer real solutions for the challenges they confront every day," said the memo prepared for lawmakers.

What the GOP doesn't seem to realize, because they are idiots, is that "the change you deserve" is the registered advertising slogan of Effexor XR, a drug that many of you might have started taking as a result of all the...you know -- terrorism. (Hat tip to Bluestem for catching this gem.)

Effexor, also known as Venlafaxine, is approved for the treatment "of depression, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, and panic disorder in adults." Its common side effects are very much in keeping with the world the House Republicans have striven to build: nausea, apathy, constipation, fatigue, vertigo, sexual dysfunction, sweating, memory loss, and - and I swear I am not making this up - "electric shock-like sensations also called 'brain zaps.'"

Its less common side effects are equally awesome in their appropriateness.

And when the Food And Drug Administration reviewed the ad copy that included the tagline, "The change you deserve," it took issue with Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures Effexor, saying that the company made "unsubstantiated superiority claims." Sounds like the GOP have picked an ironically accurate tagline for their efforts!

fierce pussy on Artforum.com

[Link]

< Untitled, 1990s/2008, photocopy on paper.

New York

fierce pussy

PRINTED MATTER INC.
195 Tenth Avenue
April 5–May 24

fierce pussy was a New York–based collective of queer women that emerged in 1991 from the ferment spawned by ACT UP. Promoting lesbian visibility and self-defined identity, fierce pussy helped politicize the urban landscape by wheat-pasting posters, distributing stickers and T-shirts, and "renaming" a number of New York streets after lesbian heroines.

Their low-tech aesthetic is exemplified by photocopied posters, which have been reissued in a book published by Printed Matter and are exhibited there above vitrines of related ephemera. Members' childhood snapshots are emblazoned with words like MUFFDIVER and DYKE; the phrase LESBIAN CHIC MY ASS is illustrated with a bathroom-stall-worthy rendering of an ass followed by the words FUCK 15 MINUTES OF FAME. WE DEMAND OUR CIVIL RIGHTS. NOW. Contemporaneous groups such as Queer Nation, Dyke Action Machine, and the aforementioned ACT UP pioneered an activist appropriation of the slick language of advertising, taking a cue from Situationist détournement and the work of Barbara Kruger. fierce pussy's posters share aesthetic kinship with the more punkish 1979 publication Durhing Durhing by Joseph Wolman (founder, with Guy Debord, of the Letterist International), in which random faces are overprinted with Marxist-inflected words.

This kind of contextualization, however, distances the work from the queer bodies that made it, and queer bodies are still not visible enough. Riding that wave of lesbian chic, The L Word now epitomizes self-defined lesbian (with little mention of gender-queer or trans) identity. fierce pussy's book, the most vital part of the exhibition, opens with reprints of three nearly twenty-year-old posters comprising a more diverse spectrum of identities, among them dyke, butch, pervert, femme, feminist, and queer. The pages are detachable and reconfigurable. Just add wheat paste.

—Amoreen Armetta        

Support the Orphan Works Bill (it's complicated)

 

[image Via]

 

There's an ongoing tug of war and a bit of hysteria issuing from several artists' organizations who would see this bill (two bills in fact) killed, while some, including the American Society of Media Photographers, have now gotten behind it (it was justifiably shot down in 2006, then given a major overhaul).

Inform yourself of the recent history of this bill and consider the pressing need to reform copyright legislation with regard to Orphan Works. Here's a start:

via Public Knowledge:

RESCUE ORPHAN WORKS!

CLICK HERE TO WRITE YOUR LETTER NOW

The House and Senate both introduced new legislation to allow for greater use of so-called "orphan works" - books, music, photos, movies or other works whose owners can't be found. Why are these bills important? Because there are literally millions of works in existence that are currently under copyright protection but for which the copyright owner cannot be easily found. Because if you use a copyrighted work without permission, you could be on the hook for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work, orphans go unused.

Think of a diary kept by someone during the second world war and recovered from an attic. Think of a box of old photographs happened upon at a yard sale. Think of an illustration used in an advertisement but not clearly attributed. At the moment, these works are unavailable to publishers, filmmakers, collage artists and many other creative professionals who would like to use them and gladly pay for the privilege, but can’t because of the potential for massive penalties if the original copyright owner does emerge.

The newly introduced bills allow artists to use orphan works as long as that user makes a diligent effort to find the original copyright owner. In the unlikely event that the original owner does emerge, the compensation that a user pays should be reasonable. The two bills currently on the table - S. 2913, the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008 (PDF link) and H.R. 5889: The Orphan Works Act of 2008 (PDF link) - go a long way to address these issues and if passed, would grant the public access to millions of previously inaccessible works of art.

These Bills are being considered in their respective committees this week. We need you to write letters and call your Members of Congress to ask for them to support the bills and make a few tweaks.

[read on...]

More on the two bills being introduced, via PK:

Orphan Works 2008: House and Senate Bills Introduced

By Alex Curtis on April 24, 2008 - 2:34pm

11 comments

Two orphan works bills were introduced to begin to bring balance back to copyright law - to help find owners and encourage new and creative uses of unexploited copyrighted works. Both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have introduced orphan works legislation (S. 2913, the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008, H.R. 5889: The Orphan Works Act of 2008), rooted in the same language based on the previous Smith Bill, which was based on the Copyright Office’s recommendation. It's been a long time coming and from working with staff, I know they’re very happy to have the bills finally introduced. Reps. Howard Berman (D-CA),Howard Coble (R-NC), John Conyers (D-MI), Lamar Smith (R-TX), (Chairman and Ranking Members of House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property and Full Judiciary Committee Chairman and Ranking Member respectively) and Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and their incredible staff members are to be congratulated for working to address concerns of both the user and owner communities.

The concept behind orphan works is simple: after a fruitless search to find the rightful owner, a searcher may then use a copyrighted work without the fear of hefty copyright infringement damages. Independent and documentary film makers, libraries, archives, and museums all have collections of orphaned works that they would like to transform into new works or display, but because they cannot find the owner to ask permission or license the work, the threat of copyright infringement (which carries statutory damages as high as $150,000 per work) freezes them in their tracks. These users already conduct exhaustive searches to track down owners, but for 99.999% of these orphans, the owners cannot be found for a number of reasons: a work wasn't registered, ownership was transferred but never recorded, a corporation went out of business, or the author died without heirs. The almost 20 page bills are drafted to address the 0.001% of the cases out there, to assure owners that the incentives for creation are not lost.

And both bills go a long way to address the fears of owners while at the same time trying to bring visual works owners into the 21st century. Safeguards are put in place to ensure that users put "diligent effort" into their "qualifying searches" (previously known as "reasonably diligent" searches). The Copyright Office will maintain and make available helpful search guidelines from owners and users in the industry and if challenged a court will consider whether the user’s actions were reasonable and appropriate for the circumstances and whether the user employed the applicable best practices. This will promote the creation and development of search guidelines and will help to match more orphans with their owners. The Copyright Office will also have to certify market-based registry services for visual art. We proposed and have written a lot about this idea to address the owners' problem of an ineffective registry. It’s not all that complex: because the Copyright Registry’s online search provides woefully inadequate results (only text based searches and results, no ability to compare digital works against an index of images), the market will fill the gaps so long as they meet some basic requirements. A number of services already exist to answer this call and this provision will further spur innovative uses of modern visual recognition technology - of which, unfortunately, visual artists have never collectively taken advantage.

In the unlikely event of an owner resurfacing, the bill provides for them to be reasonably compensated, and if the user acts in bad faith, the full panoply of copyright infringement damages rains down on them. This was done out of concern, again, for visual artists who have repeatedly said they’re not going to be able to take a claim to court because the value is too low. To go even further, the bills require the Register of Copyright to conduct a study (much like the one that lead to the creation of this orphan works legislation) on remedies for small copyright claims.

But now that the bills are introduced, that doesn’t mean the hard work is over.
[...snip! read full article...]

[...] There's still work to be done, but today's introduction is a big step forward. Having a bill out there with specific language helps a lot. Some of the visual artists are going to be already lining up to take their pot-shots at the bill. They'll try to add more exceptions and carve-outs as poison pills so users will have no use for the legislation. We hope that doesn't happen and will work hard with our film maker, library, museum, public television, and archive allies to make sure it doesn't. We're going to need your help, too, so sign-up on our site, join the FaceBook Rescue Orphan Works Cause, and stay tuned for an Action Alert to write your Member of Congress.  Again, many thanks to the House and Senate Judiciary Committee staff for all their work on this, the first pro-user change to Copyright Law in almost two decades.

And just to confuse you further, here is an intelligent, informed exception to supporting the bills written by Eric Eldred in response to the post above (in other words: it's complicated!):

I oppose the bills.

Submitted by ericeldred on April 27, 2008 - 12:40am.

I oppose the bills. 

Briefly, the original intent for Orphan Works legislation was to correct copyright market failure and improve efficiency. Proposed legislation veers from that purpose toward political compromises that make matters even worse.

In the early days of US copyright law, when the US was still a net importer of works, as China is today, copyright was limited to a short term and to few, specific, areas of protection for the author. After this short term, and outside the boundaries of that limited area, works entered the public domain and could be reused freely. This was considered important to preserve innovation.

As authors and heirs found they could make money from a copyright monopoly, they lobbied Congress for increased protection vs. the public, and they have always got it. With this legislation they get even more, and the public still loses.

Along come computers and the Internet so everyone can be an author and publisher.  What happens to the law?

If the copyright term were short and the area limited, then there would be no problem in exclusive rights to the author. If the copyright term is long and the area expanded, then this tinkering does nothing, it only adds to the rights of unknown parties who are not given incentives to produce new works, and it does not give new authors any incentives to reuse the old works, it simply distributes rights and obligations in some indeterminate new way.

Here is an example that might clarify the issue - perhaps you can show that I am mistaken. I want to publish a book on the Internet for free. I can determine that it is not in print but still under copyright by somebody. I guess that the copyright holder has no economic incentive to republish the work either for free or for money. I would be willing to do it for free, but not if it costs money to search for the holder or ask permission. It does cost money to do the search or ask permission, and it would cost me money if the copyright holder later determines I have violated his rights. So I will not publish the work. Basically, there is a conflict between the day-to-day operation of public, interactive, Internet publishing and the longterm copyright monopoly established in current law that is so one-sided for authors.

Congress could improve the efficiency of the market by requiring registration and the Library of Congress Copyright Office to maintain a free, accurate, and accessible database of all works. It will not do that, since it maintains that conflicts with international copyright law. The proposed legislation of privatization does nothing to solve this problem.

The proposed legislation instead tailors its application to that of specific interest groups, not the public domain. So it is intended for resourceful professional publishers that somehow can pay for production, including copyright searches, and control distribution. It adds more and different rights to the copyright monopoly and subtracts from the public domain, and potentially to the rights given to incentivize new works. No doubt these groups favor this redistribution of rights. I do not think the legislation is of general public benefit and so oppose it. If you do not agree, then please think about amending the bills to expire after a period of four years so the matter can be reassessed then.

More on Orphan Works and what's at stake, also via PK:

Statement of Documentary and Independent Filmmakers, et al., on Orphan Works to House IP Subcommittee

Statement of Doculink, Film Independent, International Documentary Association, Independent Feature Project, National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, Public Knowledge, and Tribeca Film Institute

Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property
Committee on the Judiciary
U.S. House of Representatives

March 20, 2008

Re: Orphan Works

Chairman Berman, Ranking Member Coble and Members of the Subcommittee,

Thank you for this opportunity to submit this statement for the record on the issue of orphan works. We are submitting this statement on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of independent and documentary filmmakers and other independent media producers who are members of, or represented by members of: Doculink; FIND (Film Independent); International Documentary Association; IFP (Independent Feature Project); National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture; Public Knowledge; and Tribeca Film Institute.

As a whole, we represent individuals and organizations that produce, exhibit, distribute, collect, preserve, and educate through independent film and media. Our group includes or represents filmmakers, video artists, production facilities, community technology centers, film festivals, media distributors, film archives, after-school programs, community-access television stations and individuals working in the field of film and media arts. We are creators and artists, who rely on our copyrights to protect our creations. In creating our works, we are also users of copyrighted material, and we encounter works that cannot be cleared on a regular basis. Orphan works reform is a critical need for us. As such, we are grateful for the opportunity to express the viewpoint of independent and documentary filmmakers and other independent media producers, and are delighted to offer our perspective on the important issue of orphan works.

Introduction

Independent and documentary filmmakers create without the benefit of sustained, large-institution backing. Like many artists in the United States, we work with very limited resources, but with great passion and energy, in order to make films and other cultural products that nourish the unique American marketplace of ideas. We rely on our copyrights to protect our vision and allow us to monetize a labor of love, and believe in strong and clear copyright protection. At the same time, many artists and supporting organizations are affected by the uncertainty surrounding the use of copyrighted works for which the owner cannot be found. This is an issue that affects all artists; for small filmmakers, however, the ensuing risk can simply be crippling. Films - even with the exciting advent of digital and other new technologies - are expensive to make. The independent filmmaker must marshal all of his limited resources to raise funds; find locations; rent or purchase equipment; cast actors; hire the many workers needed to produce a film; obtain permits; search archives; license music and footage; travel; edit; obtain insurance and legal representation; pay out funds to secure distribution channels for his work … and the list goes on.

When a filmmaker cannot clear an orphaned work, she is left with two choices under the present system: 1) proceed, using the work, with the knowledge that unknown liability costs- or even an injunction - may lie ahead; or 2) refrain from using the work. For the independent or documentary filmmaker today, there is no real choice.

[read on...]

Some recent history via Lessig.org (this analysis applies to an earlier version of the bill):

Copyright Policy: Orphan Works Reform

                February  1, 2007  3:34 AM - comments (34)

For almost a decade now, many of us have been pushing for copyright reform that would address the problems of orphan works. That was a key motivation behind the attack on the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. It was the focus of my op-ed in the NY Times after we lost in that attack. That op-ed proposed one system for dealing with orphan works -- register your copyright after 50 years and pay $1; if you don't the work passes into the public domain. That proposal was the basis of Congresswoman Lofgren's "Public Domain Enhancement Act," which was partly responsible for Senators Hatch and Leahy asking the Copyright Office to study the problem of "orphan works."

The Copyright Office's report is brilliant. Its proposal is less brilliant. Its essence is that a work is deemed an "orphan" if you can't discover the copyright owner after a "reasonably diligent search." If the work is deemed an orphan, then the copyright owner's rights are curtailed.

I think this both goes too far, and not far enough.

Too far: By applying the remedy to all works immediately, the work imposes an unfair burden on many existing copyright holders -- who have followed a rule which since 1978 has said, don't worry about such details; it puts an especially unfair burden on foreign and unpublished copyright holders. In my view, photographers and other existing copyright holders are right to be outraged at the proposal. Hiding under the cover of "reasonably diligent search," much of their work will be -- unfairly -- threatened.

Not far enough: The trigger to the Copyright Office's Orphan Works Remedy is whether a copyright owner can be found with a "reasonably diligent search." That standard is just mush. The report outlines six factors to be considered in determining whether a search is "reasonably diligent." The effect of this complexity is simply make-work for lawyers. Libraries and archives will be unfairly burdened. Users won't be able to achieve any real security.

The alternative I propose is a kind of copyright maintenance procedure (like patent maintenance). It differs from the Copyright Office's proposal in three critical ways:

First: It applies just to old works, not to new works. For works after enactment, copyright owners get a 14 year grace period where they need not worry at all about any orphan work requirement. For work published between 1978 and today, there's no orphan work requirement until 2021. And for work published before 1978 (in a time when formalities were the norm), there is no requirement until 2012.

Second: It applies to published "United States works" only -- not to foreign works or unpublished work.

Third: The requirement it imposes after the 14/5 year delay is registration. But not registration with the copyright office; instead, registration with a private registrar approved by the copyright office. No government run registries here. Instead, something more like a DNS for copyright.

This chart at the top summarizes the differences.

You can download a one-page description of the proposal here.

You can download or stream the (35 minute) presentation here, or watch it on Google Video.

 

Women on the Verge... of Being Fired

These days, New York Magazine seems to be tracking the fate of powerhouse women in New York. Here are links to two articles from recent and current issues. Are they trying to make a connection or do I detect a whiff of Schadenfreude? 

Alanna Heiss in 1976, the year she founded P.S. 1. 
(Photo: Richard Avedon/© 2008 The Richard Avedon Foundation)

The Principal of P.S. 1
Can Alanna Heiss's vision for her museum outlast her?
By Andrew M. Goldstein
Published May 2, 2008
Alanna Heiss, the founder and director of P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, is walking through the Long Island City museum's empty courtyard and pointing out the spectral traces of exhibitions past. "If you look there, you see the ghost of an outdoor Judd," Heiss says, indicating where a stack of Donald Judd boxes left an imprint on a concrete wall. "Out here was John Baldessari and Lawrence Weiner, and Richard Nonas had a piece on the ground. You can actually see the ghosts." A self-described "art radical," Heiss is P.S. 1's driving force, a woman whose freewheeling, quick-moving, anti-corporate style gave the center its vitality. Over 32 years, she built P.S. 1 into one of the city's most refreshingly unpredictable venues for contemporary art, drawing crowds of young, aggressively hip visitors to see its exhibitions and join in its boozy summer dance parties. But when P.S. 1 was merged into the Museum of Modern Art in 2000, it became an open question how long its idiosyncratic impresario would remain at the helm. Last fall, with former Walker Art Center director Kathy Halbreich on her way to 53rd Street to revamp the Modern's contemporary-art programming, MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry asked Heiss - the last founder to still run a major New York museum - to retire. Set to step down by the end of this year, Heiss faces the prospect of becoming a ghost in her own institution.
[read on...]

There's a cool time line of P.S. 1 at the end of the article.

Zoe Cruz at the foreign-exchange trading desk in 1997. 
(Photo: Tony Rinaldo)

Only the Men Survive
The crash of Zoe Cruz
By Joe Hagan
Published Apr 27, 2008
One morning last November, Zoe Cruz walked the length of hallway from her executive suite at Morgan Stanley to the office of her boss, chairman and CEO John Mack, who'd called her in for an impromptu meeting. The distance, roughly 50 feet, represented the final leg of her journey to the highest echelons of Wall Street: Three weeks earlier, the 63-year-old Mack had signaled that Cruz was his first choice to replace him as the head of Morgan Stanley when he retired.

She had come far from the trading floor where she'd started 25 years ago. She had survived mergers, regime changes, and uncertain markets, not to mention the deeply ingrained sexism of Wall Street. With Mack's help, she had risen through the ranks of upper management to become, at age 52, one of the most powerful and highest-paid women - people - in finance. She thought that she was ready for what was coming next.

[read on...]

'Hometown Baghdad' Wins Webby Award

reblogged via Baghdad Bureau, NYTimes:

May 8, 2008,  3:01 am

Iraq Briefing: Hometown Baghdad

By Eric Owles

A scene from Hometown Baghdad.

Hometown Baghdad, a series of videos documenting the lives of three young people in Iraq, was among the many winners at the Webby Awards announced on Tuesday. [chattheplanet.com]

The videos follow Adel, a musician, Ausuma, a medical student, and Saif, a recent dental school graduate, as they struggle with everyday concerns in the Iraqi capital in 2007. The three young men alternately discuss girlfriends, their favorite TV shows and friends, co-workers and family members killed by the fighting that is all around them.

Visit the Webby Awards Winner's Gallery:

http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys

 

The Medium Is the Watchdog

via Activate, 5-8-08:

Keeping tabs on Capitol Hill

Reuters/Jim Young

Politics and the Internet share an uneasy alliance. But the "character" issues and PR minutiae that dominate this year's US election coverage inspired Aaron Swartz to forge a new kind of connection between the message and the medium. It's called Watchdog.net.

Swartz is a computer programmer and former adviser to Creative Commons, an organization that is rewriting copyright laws and source transparency for the information age. He helped develop the first RSS reader in 2000, when he was 14. Today, the Watchdog team integrates multiple sources of public data about politicians with myriad communication tools. It wants voters to be more politically active and to escape the sound-bite culture of mainstream media.

"It's just one small thing I could do to put the discussion back on issues and things that really matter," says Swartz. As he and a team of volunteers continue to refine and expand the site, we spoke with him about his mission, Obama's mashup of politics and technology, and Lawrence Lessig's short-lived run for Congress.

AT: How do you envision Watchdog.net becoming a tool that encourages political engagement?

AS:  We're trying to use figures and graphs so people can really understand what's going on in a useful way. We want people to be able to pull out key facts and see that, for example, their congressman is one of the top ten recipients of earmarks, or he's one of the people who received money from drug companies and votes in their favor 90% of the time.

Right now, politics is kind of a spectator sport. You can read blogs and watch CNN, but if you really want to do something, you need to raise money and run for office. There's not much an average person can do, other than maybe subscribing to MoveOn.org's mailing list and calling your representative once or twice a year. We want to put together the tools so anyone can do the things that only groups like the ACLU or MoveOn.org are able to do; to build tools so people can start their own letter-writing campaigns, write their representatives, contact local media, and start local meetups about issues they care about, not the ones picked by a staff in Washington, DC.

AT: What are the technical challenges you're facing while building the site?

AS:  Figuring out how to piece together different data sources. Government agencies are releasing interesting documents, but they're in these ancient text formats, and weird, obscure databases people haven't used since the '70s. We’ve spent a lot of time making sense of those and piecing them together, which really hasn't been done before. The trickiest data set has been campaign-finance data, because the quality of the data is so poor and is submitted by these rushed campaigns. They're not very careful about it for a variety of reasons, so figuring out how to clean it up, categorize it, and show it in a form that makes sense is going to be the biggest challenge.

AT: How do you determine what does or doesn't get posted on the site and answer charges of bias?

AS:  Our policy is to provide as much information as possible. Right now we have information about earmarks, campaign contributions, and voting records. We don't want to be gatekeepers and say what people should care about. As long as something is factual, we'll keep it up. We want to let people start up their own little websites for their own campaigns. We've been very clear that we're never going to discriminate about who can use the site or bias the data. We want it to speak for itself. We're transparent and clear about what we're doing. All the source code and data we use is public and available.

AT: Where are you getting the money for Watchdog?

AS: We are funded by the Sunlight Network.

AT: Obama's campaign has been notable for, among other things, merging technology and politics. How has the Obama campaign done this in a new or different way?

AS:  His is the first frontrunner campaign in history where the majority of contributions have come from small donors. Those under-$100 donations were made over the Internet, and those [donors] are Obama's base. In the past, using the Internet was a nice way to raise money for an ad, but the real funding came from courting big donors at fancy parties. The big change is that he has a mailing list that allows him to raise a lot of money without having to go to these companies or PACs. The big question is whether he's going to take advantage of that as president.

AT: How do you imagine Obama could do that if he's elected?

AS:  He could put the full video of speeches and all his proposals online, where people can read them without being filtered by the major media. Soon he's going to have one of the largest mailing lists in the country. It's got several million names on it now. If the media is distorting one of his policy proposals or attacking him on an issue, he can send out a message on that mailing list that will get to his supporters and bypass others in a way that no president has ever been able to before. Hopefully, he'll start a blog from inside the White House.

AT:  What did you think of [Creative Commons' founder] Lawrence Lessig's short-lived campaign for Congress? Do you think he'll ever actually run in the future?

AS:  I worked on the Lessig campaign for a little bit, which is part of what got me thinking about Watchdog.net. I wish he would run. But we looked at the numbers and it was an impossible race on a short deadline. It came up because the incumbent [Tom Lantos] passed away and the seat was open for the first time in a very long time. Now we have this young candidate [Jackie Speier] in there who's probably going to hold onto the seat for decades and the opportunity won't come up again.

AT: You don't think it would be worth running against an incumbent? What is his next step then?

AS:  It's a really tough district to run in. Television time on San Francisco's local stations is very expensive, and you can't really go door to door because the district is very suburban and spread out. What Lessig is doing now with Change Congress — trying to take the message nationwide, as opposed to spending a lot of effort trying to get the message out in just one district — is a better use of his time. He knows how to communicate with a national audience. If we can mobilize a national movement, I think that's going to make a much bigger difference.

- This interview was conducted by Patrick Sisson

Louis Vuitton Bullies Artist over Darfur Image (Artist Stands Her Ground)

 via Eyeteeth, 4/30/08:

Vuitton bullies artist over Darfur image

 
Taylor reports that designer Nadia Plesner is getting sued by Louis Vuitton for showing the likeness of a Vuitton bag in a campaign to encourage divestment from Darfur. As a Vuitton lawyer claims in a February cease-and-desist letter, the bag pictured is the Monogram Multicolore, created by Vuitton art director Marc Jacobs and artist Takashi Murakami. "As an artist yourself, we hope that you recognize the need to respect other artists' rights and Louis Vuitton's Intellectual Property rights," the attorney wrote. Plesner, probably aware that artist's like Murakami have the right to appropriate and satirize the work of others, lawyered up and refused. Now, according to TechDirt, Vuitton is "demanding $7,500 for each day she keeps selling the product, $7,500 for each day she displays its original cease-and-desist letter and (my favorite) $7,500 for each day she mentions the name 'Louis Vuitton' on her website."

"Sometimes recognizable objects are needed to express deeper meanings, and in their new form become more than the objects themselves -- they become art," Plesner wrote in her response to Vuitton's initial letter. Indeed, as Sudanese troops and affiliated militias mow down civilians in Darfur -- as many as 300,000 have died there, according to a new estimate -- the culture of consumption in the west, represented aptly by this particular bag (which retails for $1,580 on the company's website), stands in stark contrast.

Plesner, hopefully boosted in her efforts by the suit, says she'll continue with her "Simple Living" series, which both raises awareness of the genocide in Darfur and generates funds -- 30 percent of sales -- to its victims.

Update: Vuitton has collaborated with artist Richard Prince, whose celebrated work includes Marlboro ads he re-photographs, without crediting the original photographer.

2 comments:        

Lisa @ Corporate Babysitter said...

GREAT STORY. Thank you.

ToddPeak said...

Ha, Taco Bell should be suing her, too.  That's their dog.

-Todd
www.weakcity.com