Legal Issues

Your Rights and Responsibilities

What is visual art? According the US Copyright Office, "For copyright purposes, visual arts are original pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works, which include two-dimensional and three-dimensional works of fine, graphic, and applied art." This includes everything from Advertising to Weaving. But with all the globalization of art, there is now, more than ever, a concern over copyright. Are the graphics on web pages copyrighted? Is it legal for someone to download a picture of a finished piece from your gallery? To answer these questions and more, we need to ask the U.S. Copyright Office, however, copyright law is always in contention, and continues to present many heated conversations, and much opinion. The following sites are good reference sites if you want details:

Lawrence Lessig
Professor of Law at Stanford Law School
Founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society
Author of The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace
Chair of the Creative Commons projectLawrence Lessig has made available his speech regarding copyright in Flash format. This particular presentation was on July 24, 2002, at the O.Reilly Open Source Conference, which he stated would be his last. Click here to view this presentation - be aware that it is an 8 Mb file

Duke Law University's FACE (Friends of Active Copyright Education) is an excellent resource for issues on copyright, in particular how it relates to online content. this is a site that is not to be missed for anyone who has a copyright question