There nothing more weird as normal

Pretty much what I love about artists and streetart, graffiti in general!

Definately hang him, flog him and then deport him.......

Mmmm........"I know he lives in Norway but deport him to somewhere else then!!"

Copyright being one of them.

In the Milly Vanilly Willy music world.

Sampling other peoples music is Ok as long as it's a small percentage of the original as far as I know.

In art it seems anything goes for some and many buyers are OK with that but to others even though it might be legal sometimes it does expose the real character of the artist.

Hirst did it a lot but he had a coke habit so maybe needed the money?

Using my brain for intellect discussion doesnt hurt my brain, reading pages and pages of crap does though. Im not defending him or railing for him now, after 20 odd pages i stopped caring either way.

We're currently going through some ideas. It's slow going though, as we're having "artistic differences"...

I'm going to take this photo. Running it through illustrator in 1.2 seconds and take that and make a stencil!

$175 for a limited edition of 1000. Who wants one!

Haha who cares this is urban art and I want mulah!!!!

Glad that this saga is over. Looking forward to more MW and RY collabs!

This tread is a great read. I'm surprised that their aren't more lawyers on this forum, or maybe they decided not to chime in. I run an art law blog, and we've written articles about Price and how to legally incorporate copyrighted material into art work under fair use (their included below if anyone is interested). 

While Price did fundamentally change the application of fair use (the standard is that the new work’s expression and presentation are fundamentally different to an average viewer), that rule technically is only applicable in the 2nd circuit (NY), and the original artist would likely have a very strong case against MW if he filed suit in any other district. The majority rule is that an artist needs to directly comment or criticize the original work, in order to be deemed "transformative." This would apply to the Banksy/Hirst image; Banksy uses the copyrighted material of another artist to comment directly on said copyrighted material. D*face uses aspects of Lichtenstein's work to criticize Lichtenstein's glorification of americana. MW's image does not not contain the same type of direct criticism. 

Further, copyright exists in many different aspects of the work, not only its totality. The pose, lighting, color scheme, and specific details of every line are owned in copyright by the original artist. One of the other factors is how much of said material is incorporated in the new work. Here, MW made drastic color changes, but the vast majority of the image remained the same. Finally, the second most important aspect is the damage to the original work's market value, aka do the same people purchase both of the pieces. I think that MW would have a strong argument that the contemporary and urban markets are separate and distinct enough to the point that no one bought MW's piece instead of the original print. However, it doesn't help that they are the same medium and feature basically the same image. 

As for the fact that GP and MW live in the UK, the original artist could still file a suit in the US if either of the parties directly sold these prints to purchasers in the US (jurisdiction would require another technical legal analysis).

Personally, I think the law will be changing in this area to accommodate for the vast amount of appropriation art work that is being produced.s**t, it seems like every single major street artist has done some sort of Warhol appropriation piece without any repercussions from the Warhol foundation.  

From a moral standpoint any artist should always clear the use of copyrighted material. Is the original artist going to file suit against MW? Probably not. These suits are extremely expensive and it honestly wouldn't be worth the time or money. MW likely considered this risk, weighed it, and choose to roll the dice anyways. If you don't condone this type of activity, take a stand and don't by the work or return it. Realistically, the voice of the collector community is the only thing that can really make a change. 

Fair use: dlreporter.com/2014/01/30/copyrighted-material-artwork/

Prince: dlreporter.com/2014/04/09/what-prince-v-cariou-can-teach-us-about-fair-use-and-appropriation-art/

The purpose of copyright law is to protect artists. Every single working artist (visual artists, authors, filmmakers) relys on these protections to make a living. 

Possibly in a pre-digital age, but copyright law was hijacked by corporations long ago, it's now generally employed by corporate lawyers as a tool to propagate fear amongst your average consumer in order to protect the interests of the 1%. I'm with Thomasmer.

As for "MW's image does not not contain the same type of direct criticism"

Employing tags (and everything they inherently stand for) on elements taken from "high" culture and nature (Ballet Dancers, Michelangelo's David etc etc) would be regarded as "direct criticism". That's what tagging is. That's what tagging does.

 

Nuart, you raise some really good points. I never thought of the tagging as a criticism on the high art ballet depiction but thats a great viewpoint. While I agree that corporations have the means to enforce copyrights, and are often the one to do so, I think that the brunt of protections still are there for artists. A good example is the recent suit against American Eagle by street artist AholSniffsGlue. They used his art without his permission in an ad campaign and he was able to force them to stop by enforcing his copyrights.