Today I came across a situation where some people wanted to print and sell some T-shirts with a logo on it, thinking that it was perfectly fine. However, is it?
Two years as part of my Professional Practice course for my Bachelor of Fine Arts, I was required to blog about certain lectures such as the place of art within the law. Inspired by the above situation, i’m going to re-blog my original articles for anyone wanting to know more about art and the law.
Art Law Basics -part 1
Originally Posted 22/04/2013
<== Copyright: Am I even allowed to use this picture??
This week’s Professional Practice lecture was a bit special and was attended by the fine arts and design students on how consider the legal side of their practices, which was presented by Robyn Ayres from Arts Law. Arts Law is an organisation based in Sydney who gives advice to artists based on legal and business issues.
The first issue discussed was on Intellectual Property and copyright.
Copyright:
- Is automatic and doesn’t need to be registered
- © symbol acts as a warning to other people
- When written “©Name of work, owner, date“
- Gives limited rights to creators over a limit of time – all their life and 70+ years after death (in Australia)
- Can’t copyright thoughts, concepts or ideas, only the physical work or product
- Can be owned by one person or by multiple owners
- If employed, copyright goes to the company, not the individual
- If you sell work, the copyright is still retained by the artist, unless stated otherwise
- Copyright can be exchanged via a contract
- Can give others permission to use copyrighted material with a licence.
- Permission includes: copying, re-producing and using pieces of the work
- Personal space on the web
- can have an online presence
- retain control
- can customize your space and features
- can show up on search results
- Cost to run it
- need technical knowledge to build it
- Needs to maintain it and keep it up to date
- Be able to connect to people via the social network
- Find people with similar interests and connect/ build communities
- easier to use compared to building your own website
- can share and promote your ideas and works
- Loss of control
- Privacy issues
- Signing over certain rights when entering a contract (terms and conditions)
- Lack of customization
- losing yourself as an individual within a large community
- Terms and conditions is a contract
- Every website as a different set of terms and conditions
- They are in accordance with the law. Bigger companies often abide by US laws as opposed to Aus laws.
- What permission are you granting them?
- How will your work be used?
- Policy infringement and the consequences
- You’re responsible for your own copyright
Tips:
- Online infringement is easy, so look out for it.
- Use the © symbol on your works
- Some features enable you to disable the right click so people can’t save your images
- Stream V.S download when you have videos
- Upload low resolution images of your work
- Watermark your images
Kamikaze Sisters – The Worlds of Two Girls Collide
It feels weird writing this post so long after the event, but I need to do it for uni, so here I go.
Back in September my friend, Manon and I collaborated and did a performance artwork together in two of the shop window at NANA gallery, Newcastle. Now you’re probably wondering “what is a performance artwork?”, so i’ll explain that first. In this particular instance, the artwork isn’t something static like a drawing, but an action; something that only exists within the time its created (it needs to be documented via photos if you want to see it again).
So what exactly was our action? Well, Manon and I are artists who both have our own individual styles, (she sews and I draw and write), in this artwork we wanted to show how the life style of the artist can be as important as the finished works themselves. So one of the days we went in and worked within the windows.
This is what the blurb and invitation looked like:
And here are some shots I took while setting up:
It’s was had to take pictures in the day because of the glare, however Manon managed to take a photo at night which I think looks heaps better than in the day.
For me, this whole project was an experiment for uni to learn new ways of identifying my Artist Persona and discovering new ways of presenting my art in a new spaces, though I have to say that the process was very tiring and time consuming (preparation included). To be honest, I don’t think the Fine Art world is for me, but at least I can say that I tried it. As I said before, this was an experiment to see what would happen.
Also, I had a lot of fun getting to know and working with Manon. She’s an awesome girl who did more than her share of work, especially when she packed up my stuff when I went to hospital, so working together with her was definitely my favourite part =)
Jessica McLeod-Yu 