Within one week, art thieves swiped two Russian masterpieces from the Nicholas Roerich Museum in NYC. “It’s like getting hit in the head with a hammer twice,” said Daniel Entin, the museum’s executive director.

The New York Post has more here.

Arturo Di Modica, the sculptor who created the “Charging Bull” statue near Wall Street and no stranger to lawsuits, has sued Random House and two authors of a book about the collapse of Lehman Brothers, claiming they’re unfairly profiting from his copyrighted work.

“Defendants never sought nor received permission from plaintiff to make or distribute copies of images of his copyrighted work,” Di Modica said today in a complaint in Manhattan federal court.

More from Bloomberg.com.

Eugene Volokh, of The Volokh Conspiracy, has just uploaded the amicus brief he and two other lawyers wrote on behalf of the National Coalition Against Censorship and the College Art Association. The case is U.S. v. Stevens, where the U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether to create a new exception to the First Amendment’s free speech clause, allowing the government to make it a crime to sell videotapes or other depictions of animal cruelty.

You can read the amicus (pdf version) here. The reader may want to take a close look at page 11, where the amicus focuses on “avant-garde and conceptual art,” drawing on Duchamp, Herman Nitsch, and Wim Delvoye’s tattooed pigs.

Copyright, copyright, copyright. It’s all copyright. Writing, sculpture, photographic images, paintings, a postage stamp. The Little Mermaid, web aggregators, J.D. Salinger, Mannie Garcia, Shepard Fairey, the Associated Press, Patrick Cariou, Richard Prince, Frank Gaylord, the United States Post Office: all involved in a copyright dispute of some sort. To say that heightened awareness of copyright issues is due in large part to the internet is an understatement. Realistically speaking, original creators are realizing the financial potential of their creations and, unlike before, the nice-guy attitude is relinquished, and rightly so. It is time that a nation founded on property principles revisits the dilapidated state of its property rights, primarily those of intellectual property. It is time that congress and courts restore to property owners their constitutional right to exploit or dispose of their property as they see fit.

This is not to say that all uses or transformations of an original artist’s work should be criminalized or made unlawful, but rather that the courts should look with utmost caution and skepticism at the secondary production and rigorously question the ease with which it was produced. It has become much too facile for artists to wake to a cup of coffee and sit at their desktops, click on Google Images and steal away. If the argument is that the internet has in fact heightened the mass dissemination of images, sounds, and texts, then it logically follows that finding the original author and creator is just as simple. Most websites have contact information for their creators and editors. Why can’t secondary users contact the original creators and ask for permission, license or, simply put, ask for an outright sale of the work?

And why the selective reasoning by artists on the applicability of fair use: the continued insistence that it’s ok to steal from someone else yet no one else better steal from me? Does this self-entitlement to anyone’s cultural goods hinge on the classist and elitist distinction made between fine artist and craftsman, between contemporary artist and technician? Isn’t this the same distinction that many of the artists siding with Shepard Fairey and the U.S. Post office helped to deconstruct: the blurring of craft and high-art? What makes Frank Gaylord (the sculptor and copyright owner of the Korean War Veteran’s Memorial) and Mannie Garcia (the photographer who shot the Obama image for the AP) any less of an artist? Should a “strict scrutiny” style structure be applied to “fair use,” favoring original authors and creators, regardless of their standing on the artist/craftsman scale? It’s time that U.S. courts put an end to the belief by many that it’s ok to make a bountiful living off the work of someone else.

How Will I Laugh Tomorrow?

While museums continue to suffer closings, layoffs and cutbacks, the College Art Association initiates an anti-deaccessioning petition. This position is absurd at best and irresponsible at worst. Donors will continue to gift artworks to museums and public art institutions regardless of deaccessioning. Barring a flop by Obama and the states on tax-deductible donations, the incentives (financial and tax-wise) are and will remain highly lucrative for and beneficial to donors. The financial calamity we have experienced should tell us that if the general “public” is skeptical of funding a nation-wide healthy system, they are most certainly against any further funding of the arts through higher taxes. There are more than enough ethical and legal arguments for allowing museums and public art institutions to deaccession artworks for general and operating support. Among these of course is a constitutional right of a property owner to exploit and dispose of her property as she sees fit. Barring any unbreakable donor intent clauses or other legal restrictions, if the gifted artwork is the sole property of a museum, it stands to reason that it is the museum, as property owner, that has sole discretion of the artwork’s use. The continued idealization of art and of artworks as existing outside a capitalist profit-driven structure and the perverse negation of its commercial status will only further the demise of its production and its reception.

The NY Times reports today that the inline paragraphing we are doing below may soon bring us legal troubles.

A start-up called Attributor, based in Redwood City, Calif., is proposing an approach that is more carrot than stick. It has developed an automated way for newspapers to share in the advertising revenue from even the tiniest sites that copy their articles.

The plan faces many technical and legal hurdles. Attributor wants to take some of the ad money that would have been paid to the pirate site and give it to the copyright owner instead.

It’s unclear what amount of “copying” would be found by courts to be fair use and whether or not an aggregator would have to be gaining advertising revenues from hyperlinking or quoting.

Fear of terrorist attacks has forced The Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBPA) of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to take down part of an architectural structure. The structural complex, designed by the New York firm of Smith-Miller & Hawkinson, opened just a few weeks ago and was initially approved by the CBPA.

“There were security concerns,” said Kelly Ivahnenko, a spokeswoman for the customs agency. “The sign could be a huge target and attract undue attention. Anything that would place our officers at risk we need to avoid.”

Nicolai Ouroussoff has more in today’s NY TImes here. Although I am in general agreement with Ouroussoff, he seems to forget that government agencies, particularly those with national security concerns, do not have the liberty to play with human lives, especially those of their employees. Furthermore, the CBPA may have a solid reason for this decision, and one which the general population, including Ouroussoff, may not be privy to.

We covered this story a month ago, and it seems like it’s not losing steam. Today, the WSJ reported that although there may be a settlement regarding The Little Mermaid conflict between a small Michigan town and the Artist’s Rights Society, other small U.S. towns may be facing similar copyright infringement claims.

Among them is Kimballton, Iowa. After giving their location, a local is quoted by the WSJ as saying, “Oh boy, I hope they don’t find us.” Good luck!