illegal art

[nfotxn]

Illegal Art

"The laws governing "intellectual property" have grown so expansive in recent years that artists need legal experts to sort them all out. Borrowing from another artwork--as jazz musicians did in the 1930s and Looney Tunes illustrators did in 1940s--will now land you in court. If the current copyright laws had been in effect back in the day, whole genres such as collage, hiphop, and Pop Art might have never have existed.

The irony here couldn't be more stark. Rooted in the U.S. Constitution, copyright was originally intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas but is now being used to stifle it.."

Download some illegal art right here.

Comments

woohoo!

[theotherqpc.livejournal.com]

it has "Clawing Your Eyes Down To Your Throat" by Wobbly!

(this was performed live on 5 Oct 2002 at the SF Art Institute with this really great "Digital Country" intro...)

[darke.livejournal.com]

The barbie video was strangely disturbing. Thanks for the link.

[loganbeary.livejournal.com]

The same is also true for patent laws.

No matter how anyone puts it, its just plain old protectionism, anti-competitive, anti-innovation, anti-progress.

Just think of the level of technology the world might be at if inventors and artist were constantly forced to come up with new ideas in order to just keep food on their plates. There would be a very small window of time for them to make money off their new idea before other's replicated it for their profit.

Patent and copyright filing fee's are basically bribs to the government to forcibly keep people from duplicating their efforts.

Of course I'm all for giving credit where credit is due, I mean if you're going to copy someone's work, you should attribute the work to them and not claim it as your own. And I think trademarks are also good, people shouldn't have to worry if someone is impersonating them. Of course my position is coming from the perspective of protecting people from fraud.

WIRED had a real good article about copyrighting and patents: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas.html

[danlmarmot.livejournal.com]

The problem with your argument is its implied assumption that research and product development has no value. If research is essentially given away for free, what value does that have in pursuing any of this research?

An example can illustrate: say a pharmaceutical company develops a drug that cures malaria in 95% of malaria cases. It takes years to find the chemical, discover its side effects, do animal and human trials, and get certified. But it might only cost a few cents a dose to manufacture. Now, if this company new beforehand that it would never recoup its investment, what incentive does it have to pursue such research efforts? None. You might say that 'oh, the UN might step in and fund these efforts.' Nope. You can best believe that anti-malarial drugs are not high on the priority list.

So should the copycat drug company say 'Oh, sorry, we're really selling this stuff that you guys invented' and expect to get away with it? I don't think so.

Despite what Wired has to say, soft copying has been around for quite awhile--it's been certainly easy to reproduce works, even in a non-digital age. The barriers have not been the reproduction phase, but rather the distribution: note that it's networking that's enabled the proliferation of copyrighted works, not the digital copying.

In that sense, I would argue that patent and trademark laws were never intended to protect traditional artwork, where the value of the artwork is inherently tied to the manipulation of media, and not an expression of content. Though I must say I'm not entirely convinced of my own argument...

[loganbeary.livejournal.com]

Here is an interesting article about medical patents:
http://www.populist.com/01.7.buell.html