The recent debacle of Louis Vuitton using Joan Mitchell artwork in their promotional material, despite Joan Mitchell Foundation’s explicit refusal, bought to our attention the fine balance between copyrights of original works and the digital world. And the more we looked, the more perplexing questions emerged!
So here is a glimpse into our journey down this rabbit hole.
We start with the case that got us thinking about these matters, Louis Vuitton (LV) and Joan Mitchell Foundation. LV used one of her works for an advertisement, where the artwork image was in the background, with around 20% visible. The copyrights laws while well defined, remain open to interpretation, across geographies and jurisdictions. So, while under the European laws this was still considered strict infringement, it was allowed in the US, creating enough confusion for the advertisement to be released without consent.
Additionally, recently, Hermes successfully posed an injunction on NFT creator Mason Rothschild (aka Sonny Estival) against using their iconic Birkin bags as NFT images, ‘MetaBirkin’, which he launched as NFTs in 2021. Till date around 100 of these images have been sold, and he had planned on releasing 1,000! These are not replicas of Birkin bags, but uses the images of the bags as base for his ‘artwork’, incorporating fur or even tusks – so as such no one will mistake them for the real thing. The use of Hermes’ Birkin bags for NFT works expectedly created much consternation in the luxury brand, especially since they were already in the process of launching their own NFT, and now could not use the hashtag as it was taken by Rothschild.
The creator maintained that his creation is protected under the First Amendment, which allows an artist to make NFT’s using the world around. The overlap between art and consumer brands is older than the MetaBirkin problem, and artists have commonly used depiction of brands in their works, while luxury brands have incorporated art in their design. Let’s not forget Andy Warhol’s penchant for Campbell soups or LV recent collaboration with artist Yayoi Kusama.
So why did Hermes raise a brouhaha over Rothschild’s works, while it ignoring the MSCHF - an artist collective, that takes physical luxury objects - cuts, breaks, and later resells them? They make Birkenstock using 4 Hermes bags! And they were sold at premium prices.
How then would one treat a scenario such as this in the digital space?
The conundrum is being faced with the increasing influence of AI software to create ‘generative art’, whereby the software sources the images on its database to generate an interpretative or entirely new image as ‘art’.
It is important to highlight here that it is almost impossible for artists, who had created the original artwork, to keep track of how their art is being used for ‘generative’ artworks. But where obvious, it has created a lot of tension between artists producing original works, and what are essentially technology companies using data without any acknowledgment or citation to the original. Artists have already started suing AI software companies against this, recent case being Karla Oritz against Stable Diffusion.
We understand that artists are using an ‘opt out’ option to keep their works out of the AI software range, but as we pointed out earlier this would be a difficult space to track or monitor.
In an article we posted last month, we made a case for images in the public domain to be made available in digital format for free public access. We were specifically making a case for educational, documentation, and related public awareness uses, to create more informed focus on artists and artworks.
But there is nothing stopping NFT creators to use these images for commercial purposes, forever linking the originals with the digital avatars on the worldwide web. Would the originals then lose their essence, or purity?
These are just some of the questions we grapple with when we see the myriad news on the battle currently being fought between original creators and digital adopters, and we continue to watch as this space evolves, with new questions being posed with the boundaries blurring between technology and human talent!
コメント