Reminder: If you took the US income-tax extension in April this year, your returns are due today. Which is both a sad "follow the money" in itself and an indirect issue with the following sausages, none of which leave a rich sensation behind.
- At least in Germany, wallpaper isn't like a mural when considering the right to photograph it. This rather inverts the ordinary result when the same conduct and similar copyrighted work get considered under the Eurocentric "fair dealing" framework versus the First-Amendment-centric "fair use" framework. I suspect that the latter was distorted by the problem with "The Original" in a way not immediately apparent in the opinions, but that's a suspicion only.
- Unfortunately, the "The Original" problem is not limited to the so-called fine arts: It also relates to recorded music, as demonstrated by the "ownership" of performance rights (not copyrights… at least outside the Sixth Circuit) in musical recordings in the US. The "owner" of the reproduction right is the possessor and physical owner of the "master recordings," recently epitomized by the Scooter Braun/Taylor Swift/rerecording of Swift's earlier albums fiasco. It's worth remembering that US law is a distinct outlier here, thanks to judge-made law (with more than a whiff of corruption) from the early part of the twentieth century, actually originating with photography and the 1870 Copyright Act. It's also worth remembering that even the "biggest" performance acts may not get paid (admittedly, it's a bit too historical for Generation Z, but at least it's not the Rat Pack).
The fundamental problem with the entire chain of reasoning is that it grievously misstates the relevant facts and even-more-grievously ignores the "process versus product" problem, then slaps lawyerly/judicial misunderstandings of "what it takes to create a musical performance onto a 'master'" both at the origin of recorded music and now — especially when founded on analogies drawn from nineteenth-century photography and lithography. There are no heroes here, only antiheroes — which should surprise precisely no one. Even thinking about this makes me a bigger nerd than you expected, right?
- The same commercial pressures are impairing the advancement of the useful art of long-form fiction. "Author" is apparently an unduly dangerous occupation, anyway.
It's not just Over There, either. An enterprising PhD student looking for a dissertation topic in behavioral economics could do far worse than examining how the two-and-a-half-century slide from "encourage" to "necessary and sufficient" has distorted "authorship." (It wouldn't hurt to note the irony of such research being done in the unpaid context of a "PhD dissertation," either.)
- Whether it's real property or larger swaths of the economy, money-laundering of ill-gotten financial capital (I'm looking at you, too, exploiters of scientific and advertising fraud) seems to be a Problem. <SARCASM> But surely that's never been a problem in either "common" or "rarified" arts, has it? We don't even need to consider outright theft…. </SARCASM>
- But at least that's overt corruption. (Which doesn't really make it much better.) That new flatscreen TV is stealing your soul — or at least information that should damned well remain private. One wonders if those content recognition systems extend to material routed in from one's recorded video collection… as might the owners of Potomac Video.