Julian Oliver wrote: > ..on Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 10:20:46PM +1200, Douglas Bagnall wrote: >> Bronwyn Holloway-Smith wrote: >> >>> Does exclusive possession not have direct ties with copyright though? If >>> there is no control over copies, then that opens the floodgates to >>> uncontrolled multiples, driving costs of artworks down due to their lack of >>> scarcity. >> >> Yeah, but it doesn't. There are more Mona Lisa reproductions in the >> world than there are people. Copying increases the value of the >> original by publicising it. This shouldn't necessarily follow when it >> comes to digital art, but in practice it does because the art world has >> an interest in keeping it so. They/we just substitute "authorised" for >> "authentic". > > The Mona Lisa was painted in a time where artists were almost entirely > commissioned by the church or the odd noble to produce work. Copyright as a > concept wasn't present then, as a natural right. As far as I understand it, > artist rights were within the scope of individual contracts they had with the > person paying them, perhaps more like the current British 'work for hire' > automatic transfer of rights. Anyway, copyright or not, the question is not > whether we can copy the Mona Lisa now but whether Leonardo's contemporaries > could've done so and got away with it. I sincerely doubt it!
the bigger difference is of course to do with the ease of copying in the age of mechanical reproduction. the first formal copyright laws were in fact developed to encourage artistic expression in the written and drawn words/images, during the early stages of the printing press gaining cultural dominance. writers had no incentive to produce original work for the printing press, because if they paid up front to have 1000 copies made then sold them for some amount each, there was nothing stopping someone else from buying the first copy, re-setting it on their own press, then printing off 1000 more and selling at half the price. .. my personal solution to this is make work that doesn't have value as a copy, ie to move beyond the purely digital in my work to include non-digital elements, to the point where it is not a trivial exercise to make a copy.. the area of IP law that starts to come into play more in this case is patents, and, outside of software and genetics (which collapse to a single category if genetics is considered software), i think the patent system sits on much stronger footing in the modern free-copying world. -- damian stewart | skype: damiansnz | [email protected] frey | live art with machines | http://www.frey.co.nz _______________________________________________ Ada_list mailing list [email protected] http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/
