Week 8: 17 - 21 Feburary, 2025
Location: ZT 5. K111
Abstract:
Contemporary art’s relation to copyright is paradoxical. Copyright gives artists a claim of ownership over their own work. Yet, it enforces a type of individual original authorship that poorly fits contemporary artistic practices, which are often collaborative, generative, and building on the works of others. Since Dada, many avant-garde movements intended to undermine the notion of artistic control and originality. At least since the 1960s, numerous artists and activists have explored this paradox in their works, coming into conflict with copyright, exposing the weakness of its conceptual foundations in the digital domain, instigating collective practices and, recently, through blockchain-based mechanisms (NFTs) pioneered notions of “ownership” that seemingly abandons copyright entirely. In this module, we approach copyright not as fixed legal system, but as a contested cultural domain, in which artists play a key role in developing new models for 21st century. We will focus on artists such as Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Cornelia Sollfrank, Elaine Sturtevant, and on movements such as “copy-left”and look into the strange case of the model Emily Ratajkowski who sold ownership rights to an image of herself she probably doesn’t own. We will also look at the rise (and possible fall) of NFTs as the latest incarnation of the paradoxes of copyright.
Attendance (80%)
Morning
Introduction
Would you sign this letter?
Background: History of Copyright Wikipedia
Ulitarian vs author rights argument
Swiss Copyright law
Bundesgesetz über das Urheberrecht und verwandte Schutzrechte
Art. 2: “Werke sind, unabhängig von ihrem Wert oder Zweck, geistige Schöpfungen der Literatur und Kunst, die individuellen Charakter haben.”
Art. 6: “Urheber oder Urheberin ist die natürliche Person, die das Werk geschaffen hat.”
Art. 10: “Der Urheber oder die Urheberin hat das ausschliessliche Recht zu bestimmen, ob, wann und wie das Werk verwendet wird.”
Art. 11: Der Urheber oder die Urheberin hat das ausschliessliche Recht zu bestimmen; (a) ob, wann und wie das Werk geändert werden darf.
Afternoon
Defining the edges of copyright: When a photo is not “individual”
Can a non-human be an author?
Animals
The Monkey Selfie (2011-2017) CaseText: Naruto v. Slater, Case No. 15-cv-04324-WHO (N.D. Cal. Jan. 28, 2016)
Fobar, Rachel. „A Person or a Thing? Inside the Fight for Animal Personhood“. National Geographic, 4. August 2021
Grundrechte für Primaten Initiative Basel-Stadt, 02.2022
Machines
Recker, Jane. „U.S. Copyright Office Rules A.I. Art Can’t Be Copyrighted“. Smithsonian Magazine (March 24), 2022.
Künstliche Intelligenz: Können KI-Tools Urheberrecht verletzen? Institut für Geistiges Eigentum, Bern (02.2023)
Wem gehört das Gedicht, das Chat-GPT geschrieben hat? Das sagen die Gesetze, NZZ (29.04.2023)
Bundesministerium der Justiz (DE).Künstliche Intelligenz und Urheberrecht - Fragen und Antworten(März 2024)
The twisted case of Emily Ratajkowski
Stalder, Felix. 2014. “Urheberrecht - Wenn das Recht kunstfeindlich wird.” Kunstbulletin, 2014. PDF
Free Licenses, Copyleft and Creative Commons
Free Software Foundation. What is Free Software?
Digital Commons
Dulong de Rosnay, Melanie, und Felix Stalder. „Digital Commons“. Internet Policy Review 9, Nr. 4 (2020).
Stalder, Felix, und Cornelia Sollfrank. „Introduction“. In Aesthetics of the Commons, herausgegeben von Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder, und Shusha Niederberger, 11–38. Zurich / Berlin: Diaphanes, 2021.
Blockchain & NFTs
Stalder, Felix. „From Commons to NFTs: Digital Objects and Radical Imagination“. Makery (31.01), 2022.
Jean-Luc Godard: »It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.« source
Crimp, Douglas. 1977. Pictures. New York City: Artists Space. Entry on Monoskop.org read p. 3-5
Elaine Sturtevant (1924 – 2014)
Jack Goldstein
Luise Lawler
Sherry Levine
Richard Prince
Harrison, Nate. „The Pictures Generation, the Copyright Act of 1976, and the Reassertion of Authorship in Postmodernity“. Art & Education (blog), 2012. (archive.org) PDF
Fair Use (US Copyright)
Nate Harrison Can I Get An Amen?, 2004
Further Reading:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, 2009
Evans, David, ed. 2009. Appropriation. Documents of Contemporary Art. London : Cambridge, Mass: Whitechapel ; MIT Press. Read Isabelle Graw. p.214-218
Replicas. Originality on Trial in and around Olivier Mosset’s Collection. 30.06 –29.10.2017. Musée Des Beaux-Arts, La Chaux-De-Fonds. Catalogue
Work on Assignement
Cornelia Sollfrank and the net-art Generator
Warhol's Flowers:
Patricia Caulfield Hibiscus Blossoms (1964) – Andy Warhol Flowers (1964) – Elaine Sturtevant Warhol Flowers (1967) – Cornelia Sollfrank. Anonymous Warhol Flowers (2004 -). OG flowers (2010-2021).
Legal Perspective, 2004
I don't know, 1968/2006
Readings Net.Art Generator:
Sollfrank, Cornelia, and Winnie Soon. 2021. Fix My Code. Berlin: EECLECTIC. Introduction & Chapter 3, Ebook Creative Commons: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Jacob Lillemose. 2009. Keep on Generating. On Cornelia Sollfrank's Multiple Authorships. In: Himmelsbach, Sabine (ed) Expanded original: Cornelia Sollfrank [anlässlich der Ausstellung “Cornelia Sollfrank. Originale und Andere Fälschungen”, Edith-Ruß-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg, 24. Januar bis 19. April 2009]. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz.
Sollfrank, Cornelia. 2010. Anonymous Warhol Flowers: Urheberrecht als Material und Gegenstand der Kunst. Irights.Info
Work on Assignement
Artist against a provider of a training data set
Reflections on Kneschke v. LAION, Hamburg Regional Court 09.2024
Massive Data Sets, eg. LAION vs small and curated data sets, eg. Source.plus
Artists against AI Companies (Stability.ai and others)
Edwards, Benj. „Artists File Class-Action Lawsuit against AI Image Generator Companies“. Ars Technica, 16. Januar 2023.
Belanger, Ashley. „Artists Claim “Big” Win in Copyright Suit Fighting AI Image Generators“. Ars Technica, 14. August 2024.
Holly Herndon & Matt Dryhurst
Phillip Schmidt: https://humans-of.ai
Presentation & Discussion of Assigments.
Further references (Pad)
