Comedies of Fair U$e

On the Media: post-conference radio shows

2006-05-31T12:56:01-04:00

Fair Use Follies
Simply put, "fair use" is a legal principle that allows copyrighted material to be used without permission from or payment to the owner. But a recent symposium on the subject at New York University demonstrated just how difficult it is to know what constitutes fair. And in the meantime, many creative types are left in the lurch. Amy Sewell, producer of the documentary "Mad Hot Ballroom", shares some war stories with Brooke.

Cloudy and Fair
Fordham University law professor Hugh Hansen is an advocate of strong copyright laws. But even he concedes that for low-budget filmmakers, copyright can be more of a burden than a blessing. Brooke speaks with him and with Duke law professor James Boyle, who thinks copyright holders have ushered in a "permission culture" that ignores the laws governing fair use.

Art Panel [4]: Art Spiegelman

2006-05-31T07:38:00-04:00

click to hear audio:

Art Panel [3]: Lebbeus Woods

2006-05-31T06:25:00-04:00

click to hear audio:

some background:

In 1987, artist Lebbeus Woods took a graphite pencil and created his vision of a chair. The chair is shown inside a large chamber with a high ceiling, mounted on a wall in front of a suspended sphere, and with a visibly jointed grid forming the floor and wall. Hence the self-descriptive title "Neomechanical Tower (Upper) Chamber".

Universal Studios released the artful film 12 Monkeys in December of 1995. Bruce Willis plays the distraught time traveler, Joe. In the beginning of the movie, Joe is brought into the interrogation room and told to sit in a chair which is attached to a vertical rail on the wall. As Joe sits in the chair, it slides up the rail, suspending Joe helplessly several yards above the floor. A sphere supported by a metal armature is suspended directly in front of Joe, probing for weaknesses as the inquisitors interrogate him. Joe is unlucky enough to return to the chair three more times throughout the movie.

Lebbeus' chair was originally published in Germany in 1987 in a catalog entitled Lebbeus Woods/Centricity. A colorized version of the chair was later published in the US in 1992 in a collection entitled Lebbeus Woods/The New City. On January 18, 1996, Lebbeus Woods went to the theater to see 12 Monkeys. Apparently he was not amused; a week later he notified Universal Studios that he considered the interrogation room to be an unauthorized reproduction of his work.

The director, Terry Gilliam, admitted that he reviewed a copy of the book that contained the drawing "Neomechanical Tower (Upper) Chamber", and that he discussed it with both the producer, Charles Roven, and the production designer, Jeffrey Beecroft.

The court found that a comparison of "Neomechanical Tower (Upper) Chamber" and the footage of the interrogation room in 12 Monkeys demonstrated that "the movie had copied Woods' drawing in striking detail." The court cited the fact that the wall and floor were composed of a visibly jointed grid, the walls had the same worn texture, and a horizontal shelf and apron near the top of the vertical rail. The chairs themselves consist of four rectangular planes, arm-rests with diagonal supports, etching on the chair back. The court also noted the both spheres were suspended in front of the chair from a metal framework with similar surface designs.

This case is similar in ways to the Batman case, which involved a sculpture which was actually filmed as part of the Gotham City ambience, and was also reproduced in the scale models of Gotham City used for special effects.

The judge ruled for Woods, a result that would require Universal Studios pull all copies of the movie from world-wide circulation after only a month's run. Universal would be able to subsequently release film after the scenes in containing the offending chair had been excised to the cutting room floor, a fate that had befallen the Devil's Advocate. Showing that he had a sense of humor after all, Lebbeus Woods allowed Universal to continue distribution of the movie, chair and all, for a high six-figure cash settlement.

Art Panel [2]: Susan Meiselas

2006-05-19T09:00:00-04:00

click to hear audio:

Some background:

SHOOTING THE REVOLUTION
Photojournalist Susan Meiselas' riveting scenes from Nicaragua, El Salvador on display at UC Berkeley
Sam Whiting, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, February 6, 1999

The rebel rises from the sandbags, wearing a Che Guevara beret and beard, crucifix and a face of revolutionary rage. As he lifts his rifle in left hand, Molotov cocktail in right, Susan Meiselas raises her camera.

That instant marks the beginning of an image that would become a wall mural, poster, matchbox cover and symbol of the 1979 Sandinista insurrection in Nicaragua.

Susan Meiselas' picture of a Sandinista rebel in the 1979 Nicaraguan revolt became a symbol of the insurrection. She made notes in the margins years later when she returned to track down the subject....

Twenty years later, Meiselas is still studying the construction and deconstruction of a documentary picture. Both ends are represented in "Central America Documentation/Mediation,'' which opened Thursday at the Center for Photography Gallery at the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

The Sandinista series, published in Meiselas' book "Nicaragua,'' is complemented by pictures from subsequent books, moving up the Central American isthmus to conflict in El Salvador and the struggle at the U.S.- Mexico border.

The vintage prints from Nicaragua are enhanced by spectacular color. Some of the street fighters, far from wearing camouflage, have on bright red masks, and the poor people Meiselas follows like to wear bold colors to offset the bleak taupe of the rubble and the florid green of the countryside. In con trast, the Salvador work is traditional black- and-white war photography. The border images are panoramic and wide like the fence.

The photograph, and her series, were made into a book, "Nicaragua," which includes a cover shot from the revolution. Susan Meiselas photography

Viewed together, the works span a decade of "going places where I don't belong,'' says Meiselas, who has been rewarded for her bravery and eye with a MacArthur "genius'' grant, Capa Gold Medal and about every other award for valor in photojournalism.

"We as Americans know very little about the people of the world,'' she says. "So what I do is go out there to find out the best I can what's happening, who these people are, and make some sense of it and bring it back.''

A veteran free-lancer with the international cooperative Magnum Photos, Meiselas is based in New York. She has had solo shows in New York, Chicago, London, Stockholm, Paris. But this is the first time that her prints have been given context through outtakes, layouts in the major newsmagazines and images from her book.

The full evolution describes the "trafficking of images,'' says Meiselas, who is here for a week working on a domestic violence project. Five years ago she worked with the San Francisco police and district attorney's office to make a series of collages about battered women. The collages appeared in bus shelters.

"I'm going to find the people and talk about, in the intervening time, what has happened in their lives,'' says Meiselas, who followed the same hunch to Nicaragua 10 years after the Sandinista revolt. A film of that journey, "Pictures From a Revolution'' (1991), was screened last night at the Berkeley journalism school.

"I'm trying to bring the material together and create a home for it so that someone from this world can experience that world,'' says Meiselas, 50, who knew nothing of that world herself when she was intrigued by a New York Times story in January 1978 about the assassination of newspaper editor Pedro Joaquin Chamorro. His son, Carlos Fernando Chamorro, is the first person she met on arrival. He is now a fellow at the Berkeley journalism school. Meiselas didn't know any of the subjects, or even their names, and over the years became curious about meeting them.

Susan Meiselas says, "We as Americans know very little about the people of the world." Chronicle Photo by Frederic Larson

"What I didn't know was how people in Nicaragua experienced those images -- when they knew of them and what had happened in their lives, in relation to the act that the photograph happens to capture,'' she says, "so I was very interested in that process for the protagonists of those photographs.''

To find them, in 1989 she went back to the same street corners, carrying "Nicaragua'' like a yearbook under her arm. She would show pictures and in Spanish inquire about the people, marking names and clues to their whereabouts in the margins. Some of her subjects were still in the same place, their routine no different after the revolution than before. For others, someone would recognize a face in a crowd. She'd circle it, get a name, jump in her car and follow the hint down a pock-marked dirt road. "Sometimes I had to go halfway across the country, crisscrossing.''

In search of the Molotov man, she marked up her book with directions and finally found him quietly hauling wood in a beat-up truck. His material life hadn't improved, but he told Meiselas something she wouldn't forget.

"The revolutionary spirit,'' he said, "is in my blood.''

Art Panel [1]: Joy Garnett

2006-05-19T08:00:00-04:00

LISTEN TO THE TALK, Joy Garnett Art Panel [1]:

Hi-res slide images for this talk are available at Flickr:

www.flickr.com

This is a Flickr badge showing photos in a set called Lecture, NYIH Conference: Comedies of Fair U$e (2006). Make your own badge here.

UPDATE:

HARPER'S, February 2007

p.53
Portfolio
"On The Rights of Molotov Man: Appropriation and the art of context" [PDF]
By Joy Garnett and Susan Meiselas

{...This portfolio is drawn from their conversation at the New York Institute for the Humanities' "Comedies of Fair U$e" symposium...}

p.59
Criticism
"The Ecstasy of Influence: A plagiarism"
By Jonathan Lethem {Listen to interview on WNYC}

{Jonathan Lethem is the author of seven novels, including Motherless Brooklyn and You Don't love Me Yet, which will be published in March.}

Ruminations on the Harper's piece from Christopher Reiger, "Hungry Hyaena" blog:

Creative Restraint and Responsibility: Artists, Documentarians and Copyright

{excerpt}

The subtitle of "On the Rights of Molotov Man," the piece preceding Lethem's essay, is "Appropriation and the art of context." Indeed, the latter half of this subtitle is central to the dispute between Joy Garnett and Susan Meiselas. The details of the situation, in a nutshell, are as follows. Garnett trolled the web for "images of figures in extreme emotional or physical states." One of the many .jpegs she saved showed a man hurling a Molotov cocktail. Garnett was interested in the act pictured, not the provenance. In fact, the .jpeg was a cropped section of a Meiselas photograph, originally published in the photographer's 1981 book, "Nicaragua." Garnett produced an oil painting based on the detail she had downloaded and, after the painting was displayed in a New York art gallery (and was featured on the exhibition's announcement), Garnett received a letter from Meiselas's lawyer informing the painter that she was "sailing under the flag of piracy." Taken aback and a little shaken up, Garnett turned to an online "new media" community, Rhizome.org, for advice. Aware of the legal cloud, however, she was careful not to "name names or post a link to Susan's photograph." Her situation drew a lot of attention, eventually leading to an international agitprop campaign dubbed Joywar. (The details are very interesting, but, in the interest of space, I'll simply recommend the following links: the full Harper's article; a relevant video lecture; an archive of all things JoyWar; a related photo set). Suffice it to say, although no lawsuit was brought, Garnett and Meiselas have different perspectives on the matter.

Reading Meiselas's half of "On the Rights of Molotov Man," however, one realizes that copyright is less important to her than context. In other words, Garnett's unsanctioned use of the image is less troublesome to the photographer than the generalization of the image's content. There is an important distinction to be made here. The artist - Garnett, in this case - speaks the language of the universal. Hers is "a project born of frustration and anger" and the .jpeg of the anonymous rebel was "emblematic of the series." This is true of all the works that comprise Garnett's "Riot" series. Her inspiration was specific - the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003 - but her paintings of "shouting demonstrators, angry skinheads, an Air Force pilot and his girl in an emotional embrace, frat boys jumping over bonfires, screaming punk rockers" are archetypes of the anxiety and anger we feel when powers outside our sphere of influence affect us adversely, especially when they steer the region (or world) toward further conflict. These misgivings are essentially equivalent, irrespective of culture, place or time.

By contrast, the photographs Susan Meiselas shot in Nicaragua are intended as documents of a particular place, during a particular conflict, in this case, the fighting between the Sandinistas and the ruling Somoza family. Although this conflict continues today in a different incarnation, the photograph in question represents the final hours before the Somoza family fled the country in July of 1979. Meiselas's interest is specific and historical; she is a documentarian. Not all photographers are documentarians, but Meiselas makes clear her goals in the Harper's article. "Indeed, it seems to me that if history is working against context, then we must, as artists, work all the harder to reclaim that context." The Enlightenment thinker in me is inclined to agree with her, but most contemporary artists are not interested in reclaiming specificity. Rather, we are in the business of erasing it, sanding the hard edges of "fact" to reduce friction. Lethem, cribbing from David Foster Wallace's essay, "E Unibus Pluram":
"Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall's fall - i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar - it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange....[by] paradoxically trying to restore what's taken for 'real' to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights."
In other words, we're learning to cope with the constant stream of information by boiling it down to an essential skeleton, be it celebrity gossip, dispatches from Iraq, undergraduate lectures on aesthetics or what have you. This process is entropic, but is more easily described than done. We've recognized for centuries that the historical record is ever growing, but recently the number of pages in our encyclopedias (and wikis) grows exponentially. As a result, our circuitry is overloaded. [...]

Garnett asks, "Does the author of a documentary photograph - a document whose mission is, in part, to provide the public with a record of events of social and historical value - have the right to control the content of this document for all time?" Of course not. But we are all responsible, as citizens of the world, for the commons, be it that of language, ecosystems, or the historical canon. Lethem writes, "Honoring the commons is not a matter of moral exhortation. It is a practical necessity." We have to decipher the signs with care and the reading mustn't stop at approximation. As important as our attempts to frame events in comprehensible terms are, we must not plead ignorance to create a happy fiction of distressing reality.

"Who owns the rights to this man's struggle?," a blogger named nmazca asked, referring to the Sandinista rebel photographed by Meiselas and, in turn, painted by Garnett. We all do. I see no reason why he can not be both Pablo Arauz, a one time rebel photographed by Meiselas in 1979, who now has a family and "a pretty good job delivering lumber," and the anonymous, existential Molotov Man. It is, however, our responsibility to honor both incarnations. As it exists now, copyright law is a "gag order," as Garnett puts it, to global conversation, but as it erodes (and erode it will, like language and history), we will become responsible for the context. Are we ready to be vigilant in an open source world?

more from edward_winklman blogspot, 1/23/07:

Appropriate Appropriation

{check out the comments section...}

more from David Bollier's OnTheCommons.org, 1/25/07:

Authorship as a Collective Endeavor {excerpt}

[...]The core question for Garnett is "Who owns the rights to this man's struggle?" She writes:
Does the author of a documentary photograph – a document whose mission is, in part, to provide the public with a record of events of social and historical value – have the right to control the content of this document for all time. Should artists be allowed to decide who can comment on their work and how? Can copyright law, as it stands, function in any way except as a gag order?
Meiselas takes issue with Garnett, however, claiming that Garnett’s "practice of decontextualizing an image as a painter is precisely the opposite of my own hope as a photographer to contextualize an image…." Meiselas:
There is no denying in this digital age that images are increasingly dislocated and far more easily decontextualized. Technology allows us to do many things, but that does not mean we must do them. Indeed, it seems to me that if history is working against context, then we must, as artists, work all the harder to reclaim that context. We owe this debt of specificity not just to one another but to our subjects, with whom we have an implicit contract.
It's a fair enough response, as far as it goes. But really – isn't a photograph, any photograph, itself a radical de-contextualization of its subject matter? Can a photographer really believe that the context of his or her work can be preserved? Doesn't the act of introducing something to the culture require a certain loss of control, and thus an acceptance of re-contextualizations?

It sounds to me as if Meiselas is belatedly trying to scramble to the moral high ground after her litigation gambit proved too incendiary. Her copyright claims were trumped by the spontaneous acts of artists and revolutionaries everywhere.

Introduction, Saturday morning: Lawrence Weschler

2006-05-19T07:00:00-04:00

click to hear audio:

Keynote: Lawrence Lessig

2006-05-19T06:00:00-04:00

Here's a marked-up transcript from IPTAblog by Andrew Raff.

Also, notes from the second session: Siva Vaidhyanathan, Allan Adler (Assoc. of American Publishers) and Hugh Hansen (Fordham Law), with Lessig responding.

Introduction to the conference on NPR

2006-05-19T05:00:00-04:00

via NPR:

Listen to an introduction to the COMEDIES conference on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show: "Property Values", Thursday, April 27, 2006, with Art Spiegelman, Siva Vaidhyanathan and Jonathan Lethem.

Download mp3

more about the conference, via NYIH:

Panelists, in addition to organisers Lawrence Lessig , Robert Boynton and Institute director Lawrence Weschler will include:

Photographer Susan Meiselas
Painter Joy Garnett
Novelist Jonathan Lethem
Comix artist Art Spiegelman
Essayist Geoff Dyer (Out of Sheer Rage, The Ongoing Moment)
Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris
Joel Wachs, head of the Andy Warhol Foundation
Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit
NYU's Siva Vaidhyanathan (Copyrights and Copywrongs)
Essayist Lewis Hyde (The Gift, Trickster Makes This World)
NYU's Lawrence Ferrara, expert on musical issues
Carrie McLaren of Stay Free
James Boyle, of digital environmentalist movement (Shaman, Software, and Spleens) and others

Some of the most contentious issues bedeviling cultural life today are increasingly coming to revolve around the question of what proper deference ought to be paid to the notion of intellectual property. Just what is copyright, what is its point, who is it designed to protect (individual creators and their legatees, be they individual or corporate, and necessarily to the same extent?) and what is it designed to foster (the most thrivingly fertile intellectual community and intercourse possible?)? How might such objectives, thus stated, be internally at odds, and how might such tensions in turn be resolved? What sorts of product ought to be copyrightable and for how long? To what (increasing?) extent is the cultural/intellectual commons being divied up, fenced off into ever more diminutive swaths of barbed and monetarized terrain? And what exceptions ought to be made to this tendency? What is "fair use" and how ought it to be extended (and perhaps expanded)? How do all these issues play out across different media-textual (books and magazines), visual (photos, paintings, films), and aural (musical)? And to what extent are rampaging developments on the cyberfront expanding or constricting all possibilities in this regard?

The last weekend of this coming April (April 28, 29, and 30), the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU will be bringing together practioners and artists (many from among the ranks of its own distinguished fellowship), along with lawyers, judges, historians, theorists and philosophers, in order to explore various aspects of these questions. Robert Boynton of the NYU Journalism faculty, one of the principal chroniclers of developments in this field, and Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University, arguably the field's most dynamic activist, are collaborating in helping to convene and steer the conference.

Full Program Audio on Archive.org

2006-05-17T17:07:00-04:00

The entire Comedies conference (audio) is now available at Archive.org for listening and for free download, thanks to Fred Benenson who had the time and energy, not to mention the know-how, to clean-up all of these mp3s and get them up online. Note: they are licensed with a Creative Commons deed: Attribution-ShareAlike

Full Program:
The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, in association with the NYU Humanities Council presented a weekend long symposium

COMEDIES OF FAIR U$E
A Search for Comity in the Intellectual Property Wars
Friday, April 28 through Sunday, April 30, 2006
Free and open to the public

Friday April 28, 7:30-9:30 p.m.
Saturday 9:30-6:30 p.m. and Sunday 9:30-1:00 p.m.
Hemmerdinger Hall
100 Washington Sq. East

FRIDAY, APRIL 28
7:30pm-7:45pm Introductory remarks : Robert Boynton
7:45pm-9:30pm Lawrence Lessig on The Current State of Fair Use with responses by Allan Adler and Hugh Hansen
Siva Vaidhyanathan (moderator)

SATURDAY, APRIL 29
9:30am -10:00am Introductory remarks: Lawrence Weschler
(Note: Lawrence Lessig and Judge Kozinski will comment as the day progresses)

10:00am-11:30am Art
Joy Garnett, Susan Mieselas, Lebbeus Woods,
Art Spiegelman, Carrie McLaren, Joel Wachs
Lawrence Weschler (moderator)

11:45am-1:15pm The Permissions Maze
Geoff Dyer, Susan Bielstein, Allan Adler
James Boyle(moderator)

Break

2:30pm-3:15pm Screening of short films: films from the 826 NYC kids
and the Free Culture remix contest. Comments on the
issues they raise by Leon Friedman and Charles Sims.

3:30pm-4:45pm Documentary Film
Amy Sewell, Pat Aufderheide, Hugh Hansen,
~~Errol Morris~~, Charles Sims
Robert Boynton(moderator)

5:00pm-6:30pm Music
Lawrence Ferrara, Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky),
Hank Shocklee, Claudia Gonson
Kembrew McLeod (moderator)

SUNDAY, APRIL 30
9:30am-9:45am Introductory remarks: Siva Vaidhyanathan

9:45am-11:15am Now Where Are We?
Lewis Hyde, Jonathan Lethem, James Boyle
Siva Vaidhyanathan(moderator)

11:30am-1:00pm W hat Is To Be Done?
Judge Kozinski, Pat Aufderhide, Carrie McLaren
Lawrence Weschler (moderator)