LawMeme LawMeme Yale Law School  
LawMeme
Search LawMeme [ Advanced Search ]
 
 
 
 
Historical Art Saved by Philanthropist - Threatened by Copyright
Posted by Ernest Miller on Monday, December 09 @ 06:37:25 EST Copyright
The New York Times (reg. req.) arts section runs an important story about a wonderful project by bookseller Andrew Stafford to make a prominent avant garde magazine from the late 1960s available on the Internet (Three-Dimensional Magazine Lives Again in Two Dimensions). Aspen Magazine was published 10 times between 1965 and 1971, billed itself as the first three-dimensional magazine and featured the work of people like Philip Glass, Roland Barthes, John Lennon, Marshall McLuhan, Lou Reed and Andy Warhol. In the words of Deborah Wye, chief curator of prints and illustrated books at the Museum of Modern Art in New York:
The accuracy of the moment is something that hits you between the eyes when you open one of the boxes [in which the magazine was published].

The digitization of the magazine is a labor of love for Andrew Stafford, and he has done a great job capturing much of the essence of the magazine (which included vinyl recordings and a short film) as possible, using flash and streaming media as necessary. Stafford is also the author of the excellent multimedia website, Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp. And this is where things turn to copyright law, which concerns at least half of the NY Times article.

Read more below:

Unfortunately, Duchamp's heirs are busy trying to get several thousand dollars from Stafford for copyright infringement. Although Stafford's tutorial is a wonderful introduction to the work and life of the artist, turning more people on to Duchamp's revolutionary art, the heirs seem merely concerned with financial remuneration. For this reason Stafford feared putting Aspen Magazine online, since the heirs of several of the contributors are likely to be similarly copyright infringement happy.

Enter Andrew Goldsmith, poet. Goldsmith runs Ubuweb, which has chosen to host Aspen magazine despite the copyright issues involved. Ubuweb itself is a very interesting resource, and although you might not find a mission statement on the website itself, Goldsmith has written a very nice essay on the purpose, means and theory behind Ubuweb (The Bride Stripped Bare: Getting Naked with Nude Media). The purpose is summarized thus:

Meredith's [a reader from a small Texas town] note succinctly summed up everything that I had wished to achieve with UbuWeb: that of a distribution point for out of print, hard-to-find, small run, obscure materials, available at no cost from any point on the globe.
Additionally, in an open letter, Goldsmith addresses the issue of free distribution directly (Ubuweb Wants to Be Free), which features this interesting paragraph:
UbuWeb posts much of its content without permission; we rip full-length CDs into sound files; we scan as many books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them. And not once have we been issued a cease and desist order. Instead, we receive glowing e-mails from artists, publishers and record labels finding their work on UbuWeb thanking us for taking an interest in what they do; in fact, most times they offer UbuWeb additional materials. We happily acquiesce and tell them that UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with unlimited space for them to fill. It is in this way that the site has grown to encompass hundreds of artists, thousands of files and several gigabytes of poetry.
So far, the editors of Aspen Magazine have been pleased that their 30-year old work is available to the public, but the possibility exists that some of the artists may not be and their work will have to be removed. If the artists or their heirs choose to sue, Ubuweb and Andrew Stafford could be liable for immense damages, particularly as their infringement is clearly intentional.

That would truly be a tragedy, because this work by Andrew Stafford is the public domain in its glory. Obscure, historically and culturally important works, saved from the dustbin of "ownership."

 
Login
Nickname

Password

If you don't have an account yet, you can register here.
Related Links
· New York Times
· Three-Dimensional Magazine Lives Again in Two Dimensions
· Aspen Magazine
· Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp
· Aspen Magazine
· Andrew Goldsmith
· Ubuweb
· The Bride Stripped Bare: Getting Naked with Nude Media
· Ubuweb Wants to Be Free
· More about Copyright
· News by Ernest Miller


Most read story about Copyright:
Top Ten New Copyright Crimes

Options

Printer Friendly Page  Printer Friendly Page

Send to a Friend  Send to a Friend
"User Login" | Login/Create an Account | 1 comment | Search Discussion
Threshold
  
The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.

Aspen Magazine (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Monday, December 09 @ 15:44:35 EST
Aspen was on Metafilter a couple of weeks ago. It ate my entire Saturday. I also checked out Ubu. God bless these guys for putting the stuff out there.
I wish the supremes would have reached the right decision in Tasini. It will also be interesting to see how WLF v. LFW goes.


[ Reply to This ]

"User Login" | Login/Create an Account | 1 comment | Search Discussion
Threshold
  
The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.


Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur
Human laws are born, live, and die

Contributors retain copyright interests in all stories, comments and submissions.
Everything else copyright (c) 2002 by the Information Society Project.

This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions
set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later.
The latest version is currently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/.

You can syndicate our news with backend.php