 |
 |
Takeovers & Makeovers: Artistic Appropriation, Fair Use, and Copyright in the Digital Age On November 7 & 8, 2008, the Berkeley Center for New Media and the History of Art department at the University of California, Berkeley will hold a symposium on appropriation rights in the digital era. This event will bring together artists, lawyers, art historians, and representatives from the information technology community to discuss the changing field of appropriation art in the wake of the emergence of new digital media technologies that have radically altered access to and manipulation of information. In the United States copyright is now automatic, and registration with the Copyright Office no longer required. Recent additions to copyright law such as the Digital Rights Management and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998) have further extended copyright protection by criminalizing the creation and dissemination of devices, technologies, and services that assist in circumventing copy protection, even when such circumventions do not violate copyright and remain within the shrinking purview of 'fair use.' Growing legal debates over file sharing have ensured that copyright violation and fair use are firmly entrenched popular topics in the media. These developments speak to the urgency of readdressing the ever-expanding reach of copyright and the limits it subsequently places on our right to critique, comment upon, and parody our culture. This conference aims to offer such a reassessment, and will also reconsider the history of appropriation in the arts and begin a cross-disciplinary discussion about the myriad repercussions of its increasing pervasiveness as a practice for the future. Appropriation - the act of taking private property and making it over as one's own - is a crucially important, yet increasingly fraught concept in contemporary art and culture. For art historians the term designates an often critically engaged art practice in which artists glean materials from cultural artifacts and transform, parody, remix, and recontextualize them. Yet the term has a markedly different status in the legal discourse, in which 'appropriation' is virtually indistinguishable from its shadow, 'misappropriation.' Indeed, under the law any act of appropriation can be argued to be an infringement of copyright or trademark, while even murkier strategies of quotation, reference, or influence can be deemed plagiarism. How do restrictions on appropriative acts effect creativity and limit artistic production and attendant forms of social, political, and cultural critique? What might be the ramifications of constant extensions of exclusive rights for the public domain? Is the property of large media corporations more or less valuable than artistic reinterpretations of their materials? Could appropriation be the price one pays for being culturally relevant? Is appropriation an honor or an insult? What can be learned from art historical instances of appropriation for contemporary practice, and vice versa? How might the terrain in which the legal and art discourses over appropriation meet be mapped productively? Of note here are the many legal battles fought over fair use in the music industry, while the art world has largely stayed out of the fray, leading to a number of myths about fair use in the fine arts. Does the knowledge, for example, that artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg licensed certain images they reproduced as artworks alter the reception, interpretation, and relevance of their work? Has the fact that many artists have chosen to settle their copyright debates behind closed doors rather than in the courtroom hurt the cause of fair use? Whether through repurposing found material, re-contextualizing objects for institutional critique, re-editing news and commercial television, reenactments of events, hip-hop sampling, open source art, or fan fiction, appropriation has come to define a key set of cultural practices that are reshaping copyright and fair use laws. The intersection of copyright and creativity creates a complex web of relationships and paradoxes: artists who freely circulate their work rely on licensing to support themselves, and those who appropriate copyrighted material often go on to copyright their own work and limit its circulation. The digital era has ushered in further complications, as digital technologies and user-generated content sites facilitate the easy appropriation and distribution of source material, in part or wholesale, but severely complicate the legal issues surrounding these works of art. Creative Commons, for example, has developed a new form of copyright that allows individuals to opt for less than exclusive rights on their creations, so that works can be freely transformed and disseminated. Websites such as YouTube and Flickr provide outlets and distribution centers for appropriators and misappropriators alike, but are these sites 'safe harbors'? Should they be held responsible for the legal infractions (or artistic achievements) of their contributors? In addition to addressing the history, present, and possible future of appropriation, conference participants will take up its relationship to current debates over digital copyright law, fair use, and mass distribution in on-line environments. Confirmed Speakers Include: Tom McDonough (Art Historian, SUNY Binghamton) Siva Vaidhyanathan (Professor of Media Studies and Law, University of Virginia) Anne Wagner (Art Historian, UC Berkeley) Fred Von Lohmann (Senior Staff Attorney, The Electronic Frontier Foundation) Virginia Rutledge (Vice President and General Counsel, Creative Commons) Rick Prelinger (The Internet Archive & The Prelinger Library) Jason Schultz (Associate Director, Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic) And more… Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to: Critiques of Postproduction Copyright Ambivalence – appropriators defending their copyrights Property vs. Right Reenactments Culture Jamming, Hacktivism Parody vs. Satire Copyright and fixity in dematerialized art Secret histories of licensing in the arts – Warhol, Rauschenberg, Levine… Why artists appropriate now & the stakes of appropriation today Appropriation and Distribution Appropriation and Exchange Value Consumerism and the Cultural Commons Appropriation and Misappropriation Use & Misuse Appropriation on and off the web Guerilla Art Fan Culture Please send abstracts of no more than 400 words to: Takeovermakeovers_at_gmail_dot_com Deadline for abstracts – July 15, 2008 -- Iain Robert Smith Institute of Film and Television School of American and Canadian Studies University of Nottingham University Park NG7 2RD Head of Communications, MeCCSA Post-Graduate Network website: http://www.meccsa.org.uk/pgn/ Articles Editor, Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies website: http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/