The Cult of Jeff Koons by Jed Perl (via CultureCrash) — Jeff Koons is known in the copyright world as a defendant in at least two major decisions involving appropriation art (Rogers v Koons and Blanch v Koons). Here, the New York Review of Books runs a gutting critique of his latest exhibition, a retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. “Koons, simply put, is Duchamp with lots of ostentatious trimmings. This is not a pretty sight. Duchamp’s readymades have an almost monastic austerity. Koons has bulked them up, transforming the ultimate insider’s art into the art that will not shut up.”
U2 and the Irony of “Permission Rage†— “All those folks busy downloading all that music for all those years that just seemed to be out there for the taking: do you think they were getting anyone’s permission? All the music sitting there on all the torrent sites, waiting to be taken, 24 hours a day—how much of that is up there with anyone’s permission? But oh my goodness, dare to insert 11 U2 songs into my iCloud storage area and suddenly I am Lord High Minister of Permission? Ironic, ain’t it?”
Using Search Results to Fight Piracy — Smith, Sivan, and Telang released a new study this week that examined how the prominence of pirate and legal sites in search results impacts consumers’ choices for infringing versus legal content. Their “results suggest that reducing the prominence of pirate links in search results can reduce copyright infringement.”
Common Ground: How Intellectual Property Unites Creators and Innovators — And if you’re in the DC area in October, consider attending this CPIP conference, with a keynote by Richard Epstein and two days of fascinating panel discussions.