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WARHOL HEADS TO SCOTUS
The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear the Warhol case. This is a case all artists must watch closely as it will determine the future of the fair use doctrine.
US AMENDS NAGPRA
The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was enacted in 1990. In the 30+ years it has been effective, it has never been updated. It was designed to require institutions who received funding from the US government (including...
UKRAINE’S CULTURAL HERITAGE IN PERIL
We’re all watching in horror at the escalating humanitarian crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition to the intense human suffering, Ukraine’s history and cultural heritage have been targeted by Russian missiles. The capital...
SURE, JUST SMASH IT
A New Zealand auction house recently sold NFTs for two glass plate negatives featuring artist Charles Goldie. In addition to the NFTs, the lot also included a contact print, the original glass plate negative, and a small brass hammer. The auction house encouraged the...
TRADEMARK OFFICE SANCTIONS TRADEMARK SCAMMERS
Both the USPTO and trademark owners have long been plagued by individuals and companies filing false trademark applications or sending owners fake letters telling them they owed fees to complete their application or maintain their mark. Personally, I tell...
FIRST EVER LIFETIME BAN ON PURCHASING ANTIQUITIES
On January 7th, a lawyer for the Attorney General’s Office of the Southern District of New York and a representative from Homeland Security filed a forfeiture action, seeking the seizure of 35 antiquities of Cambodian and Southeast Asian origin from billionaire...
PRE-1923 SOUND RECORDINGS ENTER PUBLIC DOMAIN
On January 1, over 400,00 sound recordings made prior to 1923 entered the public domain and are no longer protected by copyright. This includes many of the greatest recordings of the early jazz age. You can read more about these works as well as listen to some of the...
PAIR INDICTED FOR STEALING MILLIONS IN MUSIC ROYALTIES
As if it weren’t already hard enough for musicians to get paid for their work through legitimate licensing agreements, along comes this dynamic duo. Two men have been indicted by the Department of Justice in Arizona for fraudulently collecting over $20 million in...
SCHOOL CAN CONCEAL ARTWORK WITHOUT VIOLATING VARA
It’s not often that VARA cases come along. This one stems from an attempt by the Vermont School of Law to cover up a mural created by artist Samuel Kerson in 1993. The mural consists of two panels and is titled, The Underground Railroad and...
EXPLAINING THE PANDORA PAPERS
The release and investigation of the Pandora papers by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) exposed how the world’s wealthiest individuals hid their money from taxation using offshore entities. These papers also included...
CHRISTIE’S CONTINUES TO SELL ANCIENT AMERICAN ARTIFACTS
Once again, a prominent auction house is taking advantage of French law to sell ancient American artifacts. In addition to pre-Columbian artifacts, the sale also contained several lots of items, many of them sacred items, from the Taino...
THE ILLICIT TRADE IN HUMAN REMAINS
There has been a great deal of discussion online recently about the laws (or lack thereof) surrounding the trade in human remains. This trade has found a home on popular social media sites such as Facebook, TikTok and even Etsy, a site originally designed for the sale...
NEW ADDITION TO MCU—AVENGERS TERMINATED?
One of the features of the Copyright Act of 1976, which took effect on January 1, 1978, are provisions that allowed either a creator or a creator’s heirs to reclaim copyright ownership of rights that had been assigned by the creator. The purpose of these...
SACRED NATIVE AMERICAN SITE SOLD AT AUCTION
Earlier this month a 43 acre property in Missouri was sold at auction for $2.2 million. Normally a sale such as this would not garner international attention. But what made this particular plot of property unique, and the uniqueness that was used...
STILL BOLDLY GOING…TO TRIAL
The case of Dr. Seuss v. ComicMix isn’t over yet. In December 2020, the Ninth Circuit overturned the district court ruling stating that ComicMix’s use of Dr. Seuss’ materials was fair use. The district court had made this ruling at the...
SOVERIEGN IMMUNITY MAY NOT PROTECT A STATE AGAINST COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT
In 2019, film producer Rick Allen, who had been recording the underwater excavation of Blackbeard’s Queen Anne’s Revenge since the 1990s, sued the State of North Carolina for copyright infringement after the state posted Allen’s images and video clips on its...
EMBEDDING AN IMAGE MAY BE INFRINGEMENT
One of the rights provided under copyright law is the right to public display. This particular right is important for artists such as photographers and filmmakers as they make a living off of the ability to license their images and films for public...
COURT ORDERS FORFEITURE OF STOLEN TABLET PURCHASED BY HOBBY LOBBY
There are those that say there is no such thing as bad publicity. We beg to differ. Once again Hobby Lobby is in the news with another example of how the company once again purchased and displayed items of questionable origin in its museum. This time it is in...