Something really unusual happened last week. Someone on the crew of next summer’s Jurassic Park sequel, Jurassic World (yes, they’re making another one), leaked a major plot spoiler to movie news site Joblo.com.
Read MoreA friend of a friend was shooting a documentary and expressed concern over the portrayal of one of his subjects who came off as less than flattering. Even though the subject signed a release form that had a “promise not to sue” clause, the filmmaker was concerned that this subject would hold him liable for perceived damage to his reputation.
Read MoreMay is an important month for Star Wars fans. Episode IV, A New Hope premiered on May 25, 1977, ushering in the age of the summer blockbuster. This past Sunday was May 4th, affectionately known by fans as Star Wars Day basically so they can all walk around saying "May the Fourth be with you" with impunity. This year, May has taken on extra significance; just last week, Disney released a picture of the cast for the new Star Wars film, Episode VII to be directed by J.J. Abrams and starring a bunch of exciting young actors like Oscar Isaac, John Boyega, and Lupita Nyong'o. It will also feature the original trilogy cast members, including notorious grump, Harrison Ford.
It's all very exciting and even though I've never been a big Star Wars fan, I've been thinking a lot lately about poor old George Lucas. His reputation never recovered from the terrible prequel trilogy and the much hated "Special Editions" of the original films. I have to believe it was the fierce and unrelenting backlash that finally convinced him to sell Lucasfilm to Disney. While he is publicly staying involved with the new films as an elder statesman, it's pretty clear he's washed his hands of the whole thing. And why not? The fan community all but called for his head on a pike after Lucas made those changes to the original films, often with terrible CGI, and some of which altered the thematic tenor of the story (i.e. making Greedo shoot first).
Of course, Lucas had the right to do anything he wanted to those films, including turning Boba Fett into a New Zealander for some reason. The copyrights, and all rights of revision, were his. As far as the law is concerned, that's all that matters. The fans, on the other hand, saw Star Wars as theirs, and many of them used ugly phrases like "George Lucas raped my childhood" to illustrate their feelings on the matter. But I think beneath all that unhinged terror, there's a legitimate argument to be made that after a work is published to the world, the work is no longer the sole property of the artist. And while that concept is not codified in our laws, maybe it should be.
I recently wrote a blog post stating that indefinite copyrights may not be such a bad thing. My argument echoed that of George R.R. Martin, who believes that the creator and his or her heirs are the best people to maintain the integrity of the work over time. I think he has a point... a point that is unfortunately undercut by creators like Lucas who monkey around with their works after they've been released. So how do you codify it? Well, shortening copyright terms would be one way to go. [Yes, that old chestnut. You didn't think I was done harping on it, did you?]
Right now, individual copyrights last for life of the author plus 70 years, resulting in upwards of 170 years of protection. What message does that much protection send? That the copyright owner has complete control over his work for several generations, regardless of the effects of the work on the culture at large. By shortening copyright terms to something like a flat 75 years, Congress would send a very public message to artists and creators that after a certain period of time, the art no longer belongs solely to them; it belongs to the people. And lest you call me a socialist, remember that progress for the betterment of society was one of the original purposes behind copyright protection. While Lucas had the legal right to change his films, he made those changes without much regard for the cultural impact those movies had. The way our copyright law is written today, he shouldn't have to. But the law can't exist in a vaccuum, separated neatly from the realities of life. Star Wars had an immense impact on countless people; you can't just ignore that. Remember that Lucas is hardly the first franchise creator whose ownership interest was outstripped by the fanbase. J.R.R. Tolkien rewrote huge portions of The Hobbit long after it had been published so it would better fit in with the darker tone of Lord of the Rings. His publisher had to step in and prevent him from rewriting it entirely, afraid that The Hobbit's fanbase would be turned off by changes to the upbeat tale.
I'm a strong believer in the death of the author, and I think that altering the length of copyright ownership is a logical extension of that. But if I'm being honest, I'm not as sure as I once was on the merits of shortening copyrights. For every George R.R. Martin who convinces me that creators should have indefinite control of their work, there's a George Lucas who clearly demonstrates that taking the work away from the author may actually protect the art. Luckily, I have this space where I can exercise those uncertainties. What do you guys think?
It seems like everyday there's something in the news to get enraged about: rancher Cliven Bundy encouraging armed militiamen to fire upon federal agents, Russia's shameless near-invasion of Ukraine, the Supreme Court's gutting of affirmative action. The list goes on. But I said early on that this blog would focus solely on the nexus between art and law and so hew to that vision I must, no matter how much I'd like to rant. Luckily (or unluckily, as the case may be), there is a news story which straddles that line close enough and deserves some attention... FCC chairman Tom Wheeler has just proposed a new net neutrality rule which would effectively kill net neutrality. [Insert finger in mouth, pull imaginary trigger]
A few months ago I wrote about the FCC's loss at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on the validity of its Open Internet Rule. You can read about that here. While the court struck down the Order, I wrote that it looked like the door was left wide open for the FCC to reevaluate how it approached regulating internet service providers (ISPs) and essentially restore net neutrality. I was also feeling confident that net neutrality had a fair shot of surviving because even though there's a lot of corporate money in the fight to abolish it, there were a lot of BIG and RICH companies like Facebook, Google, Netflix, and Amazon which supported neutrality and would lobby in its favor.
Well, Wheeler took the bait and decided to have the FCC draft all new rules, which net neutrality proponents hailed. Unfortunately, they hailed too soon. The rule, which goes in front of the other FCC commissioners for a vote in May, will permit ISPs like Comcast or Time Warner to favor websites that pay more, giving them access to greater bandwidth. That means that for an extra fee, websites will be moved into a "fast lane" - their service will be sped up, pushed to users faster and with fewer hitches in service. Websites that do not pay an extra fee will be ushered to the back of the line. The new rule won't, as it currently stands, allow ISPs to slow down or throttle websites that don't pay up, nor will it allow ISPs to outright ban or block websites they don't like. But that's cold comfort for net neutrality supporters. Once you install a tiered system, that is, once you permit one website to have better access than another website for any reason whatsoever, net neutrality is over. According to neutrality supporters, that will stifle innovation while also raising prices on the websites and their customers. Everyone will have to pay more for no added benefit. And that's just what the FCC appears to be doing, despite Wheeler's promise to keep the net neutral.
For it's part, the FCC claims that, yes while it will allow speed ramping, the net will still remain neutral because ISPs would be required to reveal how they handle traffic, how much they charge companies for access to fast lanes, and whether they’ve given preferential treatment to their own content. But how will this be monitored and enforced? What powers will the FCC give itself to punish ISPs that don't play fair? Having spent some time in government myself, I can tell you that enforcement can be a bureaucratic nightmare. And with an ever-shrinking workforce, it may in fact be impossible. All the FCC is doing is giving itself more work, and leaving a half-assed regulation lying out in the open for future bureaucrats to swoop in and water down even further.
It will come as no surprise that Wheeler himself used to be a lobbyist for many of the companies his new rule will now help. That's sad, if not unexpected. When you work for the government, you take on a public trust. That means whatever your past employment, your present actions must meet certain standards of fairness and neutrality so as to serve America as a whole... not just one specific pocket of wealthy citizens. I won't say if Wheeler breached that trust, but I'm not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt right now.
The death of net neutrality is a big problem for everyone. It will allow a small few to determine what the rest of us get to read and say. Considering the intent behind the creation of the internet - the free and equal exchange of ideas - and considering how much good the internet has done, this cannot stand, especially considering the Obama Administration's past vocal support of net neutrality. I don't know how many of you out there read this blog, but I'm hoping that you take the time to tell the FCC, your Congressional representatives, and the Obama Administration that the only acceptable rule protecting net neutrality is one that actually understands what "neutral" means. I certainly will.
For the last six months, a friend of mine has relentlessly tried to get me to ditch my Xfinity hookup and replace it with Aereo, an online TV subscription service. To hear him tell it, it’s the greatest thing ever invented - immediate and live access to broadcast news, sports, and TV shows from the big 10 networks such as NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, PBS (no cable channels though), all for a measly $8 a month. I think I’ll wait though. I’m happy with my yesteryear technology and I derive a certain amount of comfort from mindlessly flipping through hundreds of channels I’ll never watch. More importantly, Aereo may not even exist in six months. That’s because tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, Inc. And if Aereo loses, according to its own CEO, the company is kaput.
For those who don’t know, Aereo is a startup that takes television broadcasts from networks and retransmits them to you live via the internet. You can also store these broadcasts in a cloud-based DVR, all for the cost of two cups of coffee. As it turns out, even though you’re paying Aereo, Aereo is not paying the networks; it's just ripping these broadcast signals out of the air and streaming them to you. That didn’t make the networks too happy, so they banded together and sued Aereo for copyright infringement.
This isn’t an easy case and I don’t envy the justices the amount of work they'll have to even understand the technology at play (read this article if you want to know how behind-the-times the SCOTUS really is). Ultimately, this case turns on whether Aereo’s retransmission of broadcast television constitutes a “public or private performance” of copyrighted works. Private performance is perfectly legal, like when you buy a DVD and show it in your home. Even if you invite 100 friends over to watch, you’re safe. But let’s say you rent a theater and charge for admission - that would make the performance public, and that becomes copyright infringement.
In this case, the networks argue that Aereo’s actions constitute public performance because:
In opposition, Aereo argues that it does not transmit “to the public.” It transmits only to its paying user base. Furthermore, the choice about what gets retransmitted at any given time is made by the subscriber, not Aereo. Some lower courts have already sided with Aereo, but if I’m being totally honest, I empathize with the networks, even though siding with a corporate copyright holder gives me the willies. Creating and broadcasting content is back-breakingly hard and terrifically expensive. Even some of those low-budget reality shows for third-rate cable channels that look like they were shot on iPhones… oftentimes they have budgets in the tens of thousands of dollars per episode. And there are lots of working-class content creators behind those shows. Remember, most people in the entertainment industry aren’t millionaires; they’re regular people working paycheck to paycheck, relying on a steady stream of work from networks and studios to pay their bills. It’s easy to think of the producers and directors and say “who cares?” But the people who get hurt first and hardest are the below-the-line talent: the grips, boom operators, location managers, scouts, production assistants, etc. What will happen to those jobs if the networks believe that pouring money into original content is no longer a profitable business model? And if you’re one of the networks, do you want to continue operating in an industry where it’s permissible for competitors to poach your signal and rebroadcast your content without owing you a fee for your trouble?
I don't know what's going to happen, but in a corporate-friendly court like this one, I can see the Supreme Court buying an argument that Aereo’s continued existence will irreparably harm the bottom lines of not just the networks, but the big telecoms like Comcast and Time Warner (soon to be a single world-killing behemoth). I don’t want to see Aereo go down because the use of technology to better peoples' lives is an intrinsic part of the American ethos. But I also don’t want to see a wholesale dismantling of the entire entertainment industry (alarmist I know, but still possible).
I’ll update this post with some thoughts after Tuesday’s oral arguments. In the meantime, I’m going to stick with my cable hook up, and I’ll tell my friend to start budgeting for cable again if Aereo goes down the poop chute.
Katherine Heigl has never been a lovable celebrity. Throughout her career, she's bad-mouthed her projects and coworkers to such a degree that Hollywood and the public have largely turned on her. Some have even dubbed her "Hollywood's Most Hated Actress." Lately, it appears she's taken a page out of Sheryl Sandberg's playbook and is leaning in to that title; last week she sued NY-based drugstore chain Duane Reade for $6 million after they tweeted a picture of her leaving one of their stores after shopping there. If she wins, she plans to donate that money to charity... her own charity.
To be sure, this lawsuit isn't going to win her any fans. But then it's not really designed to; it's designed to protect her publicity rights. And using that as a guidepost, Ms. Heigl may actually have a point. Here's the tweet in question:
Heigl's complaint alleges violations of the Lanham Act (the law governing trademarks) as well as New York Civil Rights Laws Sections 50 and 51 (which govern privacy). I'm not going to address the trademark issue here because she would have to prove that Duane Reade's use of her picture would likely confuse the public into assuming she was affiliated with Duane Reade. I just don't think the facts are compelling enough to make that claim (the average person will not conflate shopping at a store with endorsement of it). As I see it, this case is more likely to turn on the privacy issue anyhow.
Section 50 of the NY Civil Statutes says that:
A person, firm or corporation that uses for advertising purposes, or for the purposes of trade, the name, portrait or picture of any living person without having first obtained the written consent of such person, or if a minor of his or her parent or guardian, is guilty of a misdemeanor.
That kind of says it all, doesn't it? The image of a person (famous or not) cannot be used in advertising without their consent - which Ms. Heigl obviously did not give. In common law, this would be referred to as "appropriation of likeness" which is considered one of four privacy rights. So does the tweet count as advertising? Based on the nature of the tweet and the wording, I think a convincing argument can be made. After all, why would Duane Reade tweet that picture if there wasn't a business motive behind it? It's not like the picture was taken by an awe-struck fan... the picture was taken by a paparazzo which was then used by a corporation whose message on Twitter and Facebook was clearly that "Ms. Heigl is a patron of our stores."
Even still, this infraction seems relatively harmless... certainly not worthy of $6 million of Heigl's wrath. And it does raise some questions about the nature of publicity rights as used by celebrities. On the one hand, social media has made it difficult for people to know where the line is between advertising and simply pointing out "here's a celebrity!" While I think the tweet counts as advertising, I could be convinced otherwise with some clever lawyering. There are also First Amendment questions at stake - can a corporation never tweet a picture of a famous patron? Is such a tweet automatically advertising by its nature? And would banning those types of tweets violate the right to free speech? On the other hand, celebrities rely on their images to get work, and having that image appropriated for a use they never approved could result in a loss of work or even ruin business relationships (e.g. what if Ms. Heigl just worked out a deal to be a spokesperson for CVS? The tweet of her shopping at a competing drugstore could destroy that deal).
I know, I know. It's hard to care about how Duane Reade's tweet may negatively impact Ms. Heigl. That's the level of damage she's done to her personal brand. And this lawsuit, however justified, doesn't do anything to help her image. For her sake, I hope she realizes that legal protection of a brand is not the same thing as public protection. The former is fine, but if she wants to continue acting, it will be crucial for her to work on the latter.
Maybe the most common question I get from artists is "how much should I charge my clients?" My response is usually:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miSP9YwhktQ&w=420&h=315]
I understand why I get this question. Artists at the beginning of their careers are concerned with how they look in the marketplace, so they think that comparing fee structures is a good way to measure success. They hope that, as a lawyer, I'll be able to rattle off price points like trivia - "You're an illustrator? $1000 an hour! Graphic Designer? $700 an hour! Camera operator? $4 million a day!"* I can certainly do that, but I won't, no matter how much I like you. I'm not that short-winded! To get at the heart of this answer, you need to ask yourself what kind of business you want to run. And if there's one thing I've been consistent about in this blogspace, it's that as an artist, you are a business owner whether you like it or not. And sometimes you just gotta sweat the business stuff. That means knowing the value of your time, your work, and YOU.
So how do you do that?
Well, you'll want to do some very math-y things to figure out what you need to earn to survive (i.e. determining your overhead, profit margins, etc.), some of which may require an accountant. I won't go into that now because Lifehacker has already done a good job of that here and here.
That's the easy stuff anyway and it's not sufficient to understand your real value. You have to go deeper, and I don't think "my competition charges X for their services" is, alone, a compelling reason to decide what to charge a client. How do you want your clients to see you? How do you want to spend your time? There's no right answer, and what works well for one business owner may not work for another. For example, I charge flat fees for legal work, despite the industry standard being hourly billing. I chose that billing strategy for one very simple reason: I don't want to chronicle how I spend every minute of my day. That doesn't seem like a good use of my time or energy. I've had other lawyers tell me I'm making a huge mistake, but this works for me, and the time I don't spend tallying up my billable hours is time I can use to work for another client, write for this blog, or go on a bike ride.
Here are some questions that I asked myself when I started this law practice. You may want to consider them as well.
What are the industry standards? Do those standards reflect the kind of business I want to run? Can I deviate from those standards and what would that deviation say about me to my peers, friends, and clients?
What fees are my competitors charging? Are those fees fair in a geographical context (e.g. fees that are fair in New York may be exorbitant in Kansas)?
What's more valuable to me: my time or the project? If I choose time, will I bill hourly, weekly, flat fees, or by some other metric?
Who are my prospective clients? Who is my potential audience? What does my billing structure say to them about my business?
Ultimately, what you choose to bill a client is in your discretion and I think whatever you decide should have a very solid philosophical and economic foundation of reasoning. A lot of this is going to be trial and error at the beginning too. No business starts out fully formed. In my early producing career I was loaning myself out for $150 a day, which I thought was so astronomical that I felt guilty for robbing my clients blind. Only later on did I realize I was dramatically underselling myself and that producers routinely earned $250-500 a day. Whoops!
What I'm getting at here is that you should do things YOUR way, regardless of how everyone else does it. That will set you apart from the competition. You'll look more thoughtful, and I think clients respond to that. Over time, they'll flock to you, and then you won't care what others charge. You'll only care about how to find time for all the work you have.
*Note: these are not actual rates for these jobs. DO NOT quote these rates to potential clients.
A client asked me to review a contract given to her by a potential employer. It was a fair contract, offering her a good salary and a very generous profit-sharing arrangement if any of her projects generated income. Despite the beneficence of the employer, I told her not to sign the contract unless a small, but important provision, was removed. In fact, my exact words to her were, "Run. Run like hell." It was a single sentence near the end of the agreement that caused all the trouble:
Employee waives all moral rights to her work, including, but not limited to [list of potential projects] and will hold Employer harmless for any and all uses of her work.
"Moral rights," such as they exist in this country, are a gift, and asking an artist to waive them is a slap in the face. Here's why. Under Section 106A of the U.S. Copyright Act, artists are granted two very specific protections.
The Right of Attribution. An artist has the right to take credit for her work regardless of who actually profits from the use of that work. It even applies if the artist sells off the copyright. For example, if you design a logo for a company and sell the copyright to the company, you still have the right to be named as the author and even display the logo in your portfolio
The Right of Integrity. An artist has the right to prevent anyone from distorting, mutilating, or otherwise modifying her work in such a way that could harm her reputation. For example, if you create a logo for a client who later wants to alter that logo to include an obscene gesture, you can prevent them from doing that since it could negatively affect your reputation as the creator of that art.
Moral rights in the U.S. are notoriously limited, applying only to artists who create visual works such as paintings, graphic design, sculptures, and still photographs. If you're a musician or a filmmaker, well then you're out of luck. In those situations, it will be incumbent upon you to specify in writing that you retain the right of attribution and integrity since our current laws aren't interested in providing that protection (there's a movement in Hollywood to extend moral rights to film, but I don't see that happening anytime soon). As a rule, moral rights are a foreign concept in the U.S. - economic rights take precedence here - and really only exist because the Congress of 1990 didn't want to look like a bunch of barbaric assholes in front of the Europeans, whose moral rights laws are far more robust (the Congress of today is burdened by no such concern).
But as limited as they are here, they're still a gift. And by asking my client to waive her moral rights, the employer was asking her to NOT TAKE CREDIT FOR HER OWN WORK. I don't know about you, but that seems really problematic to me. The law does permit you to waive your moral rights, but why would you want to? If someone asks you not to take credit for your work, shouldn't they have a damn good reason to make that request? As an artist, accreditation is the backbone of your business. It's how you sell yourself. I've known hundreds of artists in my career and I can't think of a single situation where they would have benefitted from waiving their moral rights. If you can, then you're smarter than I.
Luckily for my client, the employer agreed to remove that sentence and restore her moral rights. But my advice to you is the same as that I gave to her. If a potential employer/client/partner asks you waive your moral rights, ask them to reconsider. And if they won't, run. Run like hell.
UPDATE: I just want to clarify something here. While the U.S. Copyright Act only gives moral rights protections to visual artists, ALL artists have the right to take credit for their work and display that work in a portfolio unless that right is waived by contract. The main difference between the moral rights protections under the Copyright Act and these other moral rights is that visual artists can use the Copyright Act to recover statutory damages - as much as $150,000 for each infringed work. If you're an artist who's not covered under the Copyright Act, you probably wouldn't be able to recover very much if your right of display or credit was violated.
Q: When am I required to to put a © next to my work? If I don't do that, will I lose my copyright?
A: With one exception, you are never required to use a symbol to indicate your ownership over a copyright or trademark, and the failure to use those symbols will not negatively impact your rights. That's the nice thing about our intellectual property laws... your works of art and trademarks benefit from federal protection automatically and without reservation (minus any intervening contractual or infringement issues).
That doesn't mean it's not a good idea to use those symbols whenever possible, however. The symbols perform a really useful function; they tell the world that you are aware of your rights and will defend your ownership over your copyright or trademark. It seems like a small thing, but that notice can actually make a difference. Would you rather spend your time and money fighting off potential encroachers, or would you rather be building your network and running your business? Eagle-eyed readers may have already noticed the change I made to my logo recently. Do you see it? Hiding there at the end of the word "Artist" like a little blue guardian angel?
That ™ isn't there for aesthetic reasons. It's there to put the world on notice that I recognize the value of my brand and will defend it if necessary.
That's why using these symbols is worth it. So what do they mean and how do they differ?
Copyrights (©)
From the moment your work is created (that is, fixed in a tangible medium of expression), it is granted copyright protection. You don't have to register your work with the U.S. Copyright Office, and you don't have to use a © to demonstrate to the world that the copyright is yours. In fact, you don't have to do anything. And while there are definite benefits to registration, creating the work is all the burden you must bear. It's protected no matter what. Registration and denoting ownership through use of the © symbol are considered optional, and failing to do either will not cause you to lose ownership. That, by the way, wasn't always the case. Prior to 1988, failing to use the © to denote your copyright meant you lost it. Luckily, in a rare display of common sense, Congress changed that.
Trademarks (™ and ®)
Generally speaking, from the moment you use a logo, name, phrase, etc. in commerce, it is granted limited (regional) protection. You don't have to register your mark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to get that protection (although registration will give you nationwide protection), nor are you required to use a symbol to denote that your trademark receives such protection. However, there are two symbols that denote trademark ownership - the ™ and the ® - and both carry wholly different implications.
The ™ symbol functions an awful lot like the ©; using it is completely optional and registration of your mark is not required to use it. Likewise, failing to use a ™ does not strip you of your trademark ownership.
But with the ®, everything is different. It creates the lone exception I mentioned earlier. While you don't have to register your mark in order to use a ™, you MUST register your mark if you want to use an ®. You're also not allowed to use an ® if you don't have a validly registered mark. Doing so constitutes fraud, which can be punished by fine or even imprisonment (pretty rare, but still). If you do have a validly registered mark and you fail to use the ®, you most likely won't be able to recover money for any financial harm you suffer if someone does infringe your mark.
In my opinion, these symbols are a gift to you from the U.S. government. They're easy to use, they give you a lot of authority, and the burden on you to use them is very small. While they are optional, I can't think of a single reason not to use them.
Three weeks ago, Steph and I decided to publicly announce that we're expecting our first child (September 1st, dear readers! Mark your calendars). It was crucial to us that the announcement be memorable and fun, and almost immediately, Steph hit upon the idea that the announcement take the form of a movie poster. I'm a film buff after all, so I think she knew I couldn't say no. My initial concept was to do a horror-themed one sheet in the vein of Saw, but Steph didn't like the idea of equating our bundle of joy with murderous psychopathy, so we quickly settled on another well-worn trope: the bright, colorful, goofy posters for terrible Matthew McConaughey romantic comedies like Failure to Launch, or How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. The poster would feature us against a white backdrop, Steph as the beautiful, glowing mother-to-be, while I acted the part of the hapless but gold-hearted man-child.
Concept in hand, we hired a friend and professional photographer, Alex Jones, to shoot the poster. I wanted this thing to be perfect and my camera gear - an iPhone 5 - wasn't exactly going to cut it. I also knew Alex could deliver what I was looking for with minimal direction; he did my headshots last year and those were universally praised. As expected, Alex's poster shots went above and beyond. And after two days of experimenting with layouts, fonts, and colors, here's what we came up with:
The announcement was a big hit with friends and family and it was also a creatively satisfying experience. So why am I telling you this? First, I'm proud of the way the poster came out and I just want to brag a little. Second, I thought the poster was a good example of the weird world of "derivative works."
A derivative work is an adaptation, translation, or modification of an existing copyrighted work. You see them all the time without even realizing it. A film based on a book, a photograph of a sculpture, a cover of a song, an English translation of a Russian novel, a collage of cat meme pictures... all of these are derivative works. And with the internet providing unlimited free access to all sorts of visual content, it's become pretty easy to build a career as a derivative work artist. As a result, I frequently get questions from collage artists and photographers asking where the line is when it comes to using the works of others in their own work.
Unfortunately for them, that line is pretty clear; the only person allowed to make a derivative work of the original is the owner of the original! It's codified in our copyright law as an exclusive right, which means that if you author a derivative work without permission of the copyright owner, you could actually be liable for copyright infringement (exception: photographing or painting exterior structures like buildings and sculptures for commercial gain are generally not copyright infringement if the structures are easily visible from a public place). Without that permission, your only recourse is the fair use doctrine, which I've been pretty vocal about being a lousy way to get out from under a copyright infringement claim.
To complicate matters further, if you author a derivative work, you will own the copyright in the parts of the work that are unique to you, even if the derivative was unauthorized. The original copyright, of course, will still remain with the owner. This weird overlap can lead to some sticky situations with both parties claiming some copyright interest in the work and neither being able to profit off the other's creation.
So looking at our faux-movie poster, how does this dynamic play out?
You'll notice that a big reason I'm safe is because I'm not making money off the poster. That, obviously, is no consolation to a working artist who needs to make money to survive. So my blanket piece of advice for artists who rely on the works of others to create their own: do your best to get permission, use older work that's in the public domain, or avoid using preexisting work altogether. And if you're not interested in that, please talk to a lawyer to see if your intended use is protected by fair use.
Ultimately, I think your time is better spent creating new work rather than defending yourself on an infringement claim because you used old work.
[Author's Note: I don't actually know Judd Apatow and A.O. Scott.]
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