Can You Commit Copyright Infringement By Using Your Own Work?

Mrs. Grundy writes: Notorious appropriation artist Richard Prince has been in the news again with his show consisting of screen shots of other people's Instagram photos printed as large inkjets on canvas. These prints have reportedly sold for $90,000. In 2013 Prince successfully defeated a lawsuit for a previous appropriation by convincing the court his work was 'transformative' and it's likely this new work would also find a sympathetic ear in the court. Among the photographs whose work he used this time were several from the Suicide Girls Instagram feed. In response, Selena Mooney, cofounder of Suicide Girls, began offering exact replicas of Prince's pieces that used her photographs for a mere $90. Photographer Mark Meyer looks at the bizarre possibility that if Prince's use of Mooney's work is transformative and fair, Mooney's might be copyright infringement.

Comments

Correct, but silly

[AK Marc]

It's simple, if it's copyrighted, it's copyrighted. It doesn't matter that it's a derivative of your own earlier works. That a screenshot (of someone else's work) is copyrightable is the problem. If you were to copy his method to come to a similar (or even identical) work, you'd be legal, but to copy his exact work, it doesn't matter that it's transformative of your original work.

These issues have been well explored in music, where "borrowing" from others is well known and broadly practiced.

Re:Correct, but silly

[Anonymous Coward]

As usual, the Slashdot summary is wrong, although even TFA doesn't make it very clear. The $90 version isn't an exact replica. There's another comment added to the bottom, and without digging into the details I'm guessing it's the presence of the comments that made the $90.000 version "transformative" (In fact it's arguably fair use as well, since it's commentary on the image). Now, of course, the $90 still isn't on the clear at all, because the idea of having the comments as part of the work was part of Richard Prince's "transformation". While ideas in itself can't be copyrighted, this goes into the core of the originality and differentiation of the new work. The $90 piece is neither original nor differentiated from the former. Albeit, arguably, the statement it's making is stronger than the $90.000 one, but that's an opinion. So the TL DR version: None of the versions being talked about are "exact replicas" as the summary claims.

Re:Correct, but silly

[Anonymous Coward]

Richard Prince is using entire photographs so I don't think it's a pointless rhetorical question at all. In fact: it seems highly relevant to the discussion at hand.

Re:stupid

[MightyMartian]

It is if you have the right lawyers.

Re:Obviously her performance is also transformativ

[Anonymous Coward]

The only problem is the way in which she was "marketing..these prints as cheaper alternatives to Prince's.." and that would make the argument that they are a new work of art very difficult.

How so? They are alternatives, substitutes even. That is the point. The price for that piece of art is arbitrary and inflated by artificial scarcity, which she denounces and replaces with accessible art for the masses, thus showing us the true colors of the commercial art world, which, even when faced with appropriation art, still favors scarcity over impact. If the number of copies is so important to the art establishment, then how is changing the number of available copies not an artistic act? And to really drive it home, she does it in a performance that is thinly veiled as a commercial endeavor: Art posing as business in response to business posing as art. You'd have to be a complete philistine to not recognize it. (I'm not being facetious here: Obviously her selling these pictures is a comment on the appropriation of her own pictures, and should be seen in the same light. She did not open a business where you can buy replicas of just any piece of art, just replicas of the pictures related to her own pictures. That it elicits the most revealing response imaginable proves her insight.)

Re:stupid

[Lehk228]

so much of what passes for art these days is degenerate shit.