Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University

“Piracy by Design: Authorship and Copyright in Literature, Art, and Architecture”

 Panel with Noam M. Elcott, Ana Miljački, and Robert E. Spoo

Tuesday, September 17, 2024 @5pm ET

N107 (School of Architecture)

Noam M. Elcott, “Resurrections of the Author: From Richard Prince to Arthur Jafa”
Since the end of the nineteenth century, copyright has been a poor legal mechanism to secure authorship for most fine artists, who deal in unique originals and have little financial incentive to protect copies. Appropriation art, ironically, simultaneously challenged copyright and returned it to the center of artistic authorship. Beginning with Arthur Jafa’s recent appropriation of a Richard Prince appropriation, this short talk will foreground the current crisis in artistic copyright and authorship in light of the US Supreme Court’s decision in Goldsmith v. Warhol, generative AI, artistic community standards, and above all progressive and regressive artistic practices.

Ana Miljacki, “Architectural Authorship on Trial”
In 1996, a former temporary employee of OMA London, and a former student at the Architectural Association (AA), Gareth Pearce, filed copyright infringement complaints against Rem Koolhaas, OMA, Ove Arup, and the City of Rotterdam for an alleged direct copying of his thesis drawings for the production of the Kunsthal. I will recount parts of the history of this court-case that reveal a profound misalignment between the realities of architectural practice, and the persistent, colloquial, as well as juridical assumptions of the coherence between author and “their” work.

Robert E. Spoo, “Lawful Piracy in the New Nation: Bookaneering and Courtesy in 19^th-century U.S. Publishing”
“Lawful Piracy” may seem an oxymoron. We usually think of pirates, whether on the high seas or on the Internet, as breaking laws. But the rhetorical history of intellectual piracy shows that this accusatory term has proliferated even, perhaps especially, when copied works or creations were unprotected by formal laws. “Piracy” in these periods has served to express moral disgust for disapproved behavior or frustration over the law’s inadequacy. Notably, the word “piracy” took on multiple meanings when nineteenth-century American publishers were free to reprint any foreign author’s book without authorization, payment, or fear of legal liability. Beginning in 1790, U.S. copyright statutes had expressly authorized and encouraged the free reprinting of foreign works. Many publishers responded enthusiastically, arguing that cheap, plentiful books by authors like Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Wilkie Collins served the cultural and educational needs of a new nation. But by 1840 or 1850, prominent publishers in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia had formed a kind of cartel that enabled them to treat foreign authors’ works as if they were protected by copyright in the U.S. and even to pay foreign authors or their publishers royalties or honoraria. American publishers like Henry Holt called this practice “trade courtesy,” and it grew into an elaborate system of informal publishing norms that, for decades, helped to fill the U.S. copyright vacuum for foreign authors. Not all publishers complied, however. Some publishers defected from courtesy norms; others never observed them at all. These outliers were deemed “pirates” by courtesy-observing publishers, who had perhaps once been deemed pirates themselves.

Noam M. Elcott is a professor of modern art history at Columbia University and an editor of the journal Grey Room, where he recently co-edited a special issue on “Art Beyond Copyright.” His current book projects are Art^TM: A History of Modern Art, Authenticity, and Trademarks and Photography, Identity, Status: August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century.

Ana Miljački is a historian, critic, curator and Professor of Architecture at MIT, where she directs the SMArchS program. In 2018, Miljački launched MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab, engaged in critical, curatorial, and broadcasting work. She was one of three curators of the US Pavilion for the 14th Venice Biennale in 2014, with the project OfficeUS. She recently coedited LOG 54: Coauthoring with Ann Lui. Critical Broadcasting Lab’s project The Pilgrimage is included this fall in the Timişoara Architectural Biennial: Cover me Softly.

Robert Spoo is the Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters at Princeton. Previously, he held an endowed chair in Law at the University of Tulsa, where he was also Professor of English and editor of the James Joyce Quarterly. Spoo’s research and teaching merge interdisciplinary interests in literature, law, and theories of intellectual property and the public domain. His writing focuses on modern Irish figures, notably James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, and he is actively involved in the law-and-literature movement within modernist studies. Pairing his academic career with work as a practicing lawyer, he has assisted scholars, writers, and creative artists with the challenges of copyright and fair use and served as co-counsel in a groundbreaking lawsuit to free scholars from unwarranted copyright threats by the Estate of James Joyce.
 

M+M strives to make everyone feel welcome. If you are concerned that room N107 will not provide adequate physical accommodation for you, please contact us in advance to discuss it.