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Dear all, I've been following with great interest the discussion and the responds which have been so informative! I would like to go back to copyright in general, with an example of more traditional forms of visual arts and bringing a couple of examples of lawsuits into it too. I used to work in an art picture library (researching the educational use of digital images), where I understood how image licensing and copyright worked. It did make perfect sense: publishers, advertisers and the media paid fees to get a license to reproduce a picture of an artwork. These were profitable companies that could afford the fees and would make further profit from using the said artworks. Individual researchers might had to pay a fee for publishing an image in academic and scholarly publications. A great proportion of the money would go back to the artists or their estates or the museums and galleries holding the artworks. The picture library was also operating an artists' collecting society, representing artists and handling copyright issues on their behalf. Artists and museums could choose to have as much or as less control over what would be published/reproduced, in what context and for what purpose (thus their moral rights were respected). That seemed a great way of putting forward the IPRs of the artists/collections and of generating essential revenue (the artists -especially those lesser known in the artworld or those with not many sources of income- could keep doing what they do and the museums and collections would create income to support their activities). This was around the time when the economic climate became quite bleak and funding cuts for arts and culture were looming in the horizon. By the time I left, many museums had already established their own picture libraries/rights departments to license artworks held in their collections and to generate income to fund their activities (whether that would be digitisation so as to increase online access for the public, or educational or conservation activities and so on). I certainly do not dispute that there are certain restrictions placed upon artists with the application of copyright and the problems with the interests of various stakeholders, including corporate ones too. However, what I am trying to say is that there is another side to this coin that could be beneficial to artists too. Copyright can possibly work vice versa. I recently found out about a copyright claim filed in Massachusetts against Dreamworks and Paramount Pictures by artist Jayme Gordon, according to whom the movie 'Kung Fu Panda' is based on and copied from copyright works authored and owned by him ( http://aandalawblog.blogspot.com/2011_02_01_archive.html). And yet, many copyright disputes emerge among artists: Damien Hirst recently demanded compensation from a 16-year old artist who appropriated images of his £50 million diamond-encrusted skull. The young artist produced collages and stencil designs and sells them on an online gallery for £65 a piece ( http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/29741/hirst-demands-compensation-from-teen-artist/). In light of all these, on the one hand corporations do make commercial uses of artworks. And on the other hand, artists may make commercial use of their work. So, how can we look at the issue? Should we be abolishing the concept of copyright all together? Should there be different layers of copyright? One layer for corporations and one layer for artists? And, given that I am referring to instances of traditional visual arts, which are different from new media art, should copyright be defined different in new media art compared to traditional forms of art? Thanks, Kalliopi