Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have emerged as an important medium for the creation, sale and collection of art, with many major business and fashion houses creating their own NFT projects. This book investigates the eruption of NFT crypto art, and its impact on copyright law. Chapters address topics at the intersection between AI, smart contracts, data science, copyright law and arts administration. With snapshots of the ongoing heated debates around copyright law, the book investigates whether NFTs violate copyright and moral rights, the liability of NFTs platforms, impacts on ethical issues such as counterfeiting. The first book published on this emergent topic, this book offers a comprehensive overview of opportunities and challenges raised by NFTs to copyright law and, more generally, to the regulation and economics of the creative and cultural industries. The book is addressed to law and tech enthusiasts as well as academics, students, practitioners and policy makers interested in the intersection between copyright rules and new forms of technology.

A leading legal scholar offers a compelling new theory to explain the meteoric rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and their impact on art, business, entertainment, and society, and explains how they are revolutionizing our understanding of ownership. If you buy an NFT, do you own anything? Critics say no. Then why are people spending so much money to own them—to the tune of $27 billion in 2021? And why are big businesses and venture capital firms investing hundreds of millions to develop NFTs for people’s use in the metaverse, a purely imaginary world? In Creators Take Control, Edward Lee offers a compelling new theory he calls “Tokenism” that answers these perplexing questions. Using vivid examples, Lee lucidly explains how NFTs operate—and how they fundamentally change our understanding of ownership. Tokenism is an artistic, cultural, and technological movement that creates value in a new kind of ownership of a new type of property—symbolized by a virtual token—through a process of technological abstraction and artificial scarcity effectuated by NFTs. Ownership becomes virtual. What Cubism did in radically changing the twentieth-century perspective of creating and viewing art through cubes, Tokenism does today in altering our perspective of owning art and other things through tokens. Both movements radically reimagine what’s possible. Creators and businesses have seized upon this profound transformation. In a short time, they have developed a new market for digital art, important new rights for creators, innovative business models based on decentralized collaboration, and a new type of interactive ownership that enables identity, community, and patronage through NFTs. These innovations are just the start of revolutionary changes to society. Lee shows how NFTs create a new form of decentralized intellectual property, or De-IP. Comparable to the movement to decentralized finance (DeFi), De-IP empowers creators to take control of their artistic productions and livelihood. Lee’s intellectual tour de force is filled with practical insights—and hope—for fostering creativity and a Virtual Renaissance for the ages.

The purchase of this ebook edition does not entitle you to receive access to the Connected eBook on CasebookConnect. You will need to purchase a new print book to get access to the full experience including: lifetime access to the online ebook with highlight, annotation, and search capabilities, plus an outline tool and other helpful resources. Art Law: Cases and Materials, Third Edition is written by Leonard DuBoff, a founder of the discipline of art law, and by Michael Murray, a prolific scholar of art law and intellectual property law. The current edition focuses on law and the visual arts world that now embraces the disruptive forces of blockchains and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Designed as a primary text for courses on art law, law and the visual arts, cultural property law, or cultural heritage law, the three-part framework of this highly readable casebook explores artists’ rights under copyright, trademark, right of publicity, moral rights, and the First Amendment; art markets including the law of galleries, dealers, auctions, and museums; and the legal issues surrounding international preservation of art and cultural property, including smuggling and theft in peacetime, looting and plundering in wartime, and protection of native and indigenous peoples’ art. New to the Third Edition: As stated by the author of the introduction, Jane Ginsburg of Columbia Law School says, “The tremendous sweep of this casebook takes in the manifold fields that the apparently simple name ‘Art Law’ implicates. From ‘What is Art?’ through the different kinds of intellectual property encompassed within artists’ rights, through censorship and freedom of expression to the many permutations of the art market, and on to international and domestic protections of cultural property, the casebook enmeshes the student in an extraordinary variety of fascinating, and often intractable, legal issues. The current edition not only generally updates its predecessor but adds such cutting-edge digital matters as NFTs (which unsettle some notions of “what is art,” and pervade the gamut of IP issues), the role of artificial intelligence in the creation of works of art, and the impact of deepfakes on the right of publicity.” The Third Edition explores how NFTs and the market for digital art has changed how artists, collectors, and the general public view and interact with the art world. NFTs have disrupted the calculation of what is art and who is an artist and challenge the centuries old systems of valuation of art even though they apply the same basic factors of scarcity, provenance (authenticity), attribution to a particular artist, popularity, historical significance, and potential for growth in value. NFTs and metaverse have thrust an entirely new class of creators and content owners into a crypto community that disfavors law and champions copying. NFTs have made digital art a popular and expensive art investment, but this pushes to the forefront the uncomfortable uncertainties of how the law treats digital works under the copyright first sale doctrine. NFTs now enable American artists to list and sell art works linked to smart contracts that set a rate for the payment of resale royalties and can issue a royalty payment whenever these art works are resold on an exchange that supports the payment of royalties for transactions on the blockchain where the art is registered. The text also explores how deep fakes and AI rendering technologies have created new issues regarding unauthorized uses in false endorsement situations and lookalike avatars and profile pictures (PFPs). Professors and students will benefit from: A very current text covering the real world and metaverse art world of the 2020s A rich collection of illustrations from and about the cases and issues PowerPoints that cover each case, topic, and subtopic

Research into creative and cultural organisations has proliferated, benefitting from insights from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Starting a research journey can be daunting in such a diverse field. This book provides expert insights into research process and practice, with a qualitative focus. The book helps readers to plan, execute, and analyse research, turning their work into data, results, and new knowledge. Taking an individual perspective, the author addresses a trio of paradigms, methodologies, and methods, and applies them to the whole research process, from start to finish. The book seamlessly links theoretical and conceptual aspects with best research practice along the way. A book for researchers at all stages of their work, the resources are also valuable for students and reflective cultural practitioners who want to know how to plan, implement, and evaluate their research project.

Craft is resurgent. More people are buying craft; more money is being spent on craft products than ever before. This book centres craft as a creative industry, illuminating the experiences of those working in and around craft, particularly people from marginalised groups. Shining a light on inequalities around craft work, the author examines the lived experiences of women makers of colour in the professional craft sector. Experiences of racism and microaggressions at all stages of their craft career are analysed. The author draws on innovative empirical research carried out in the UK and Australia, two countries where the resurgence in craft is apparent, yet professional craft practice is dominated by the white and relatively privileged. In interrogating hierarchies of expertise and cultural value in craft, the author employs case studies from community crafts and social enterprises. The result is a book of interest to scholars at the intersections of the creative and cultural industries, the creative economy and inequalities at work.

Exploring the debate over the benefits of legal protection for fashion design, this book focuses on how a combination of minimal legal protections for design, evolving social norms, digital technology, and market forces can promote innovation and creativity in a business known for its fast-paced remixing and borrowing. Focusing on the advantages and disadvantages of the main US and EU IP laws that protect fashion design in the world’s biggest fashion markets, it describes how recent US case law in copyright and trademark cases has led to misaligned incentives for the industry and a lack of clear protection, while, in the EU, the CJEU’s interpretation of the pan-European design rights system has created significant overlap with copyright law and risks, leading to the overprotection of design. The book proposes that creativity and innovation in fashion derive some benefit from a limited unregistered design right protection, and that cumulation with copyright protection is unhelpful. It also proposes that there is a larger role for developing social norms relating to sustainability, the ethics of cultural appropriation, and the online shaming of counterfeiters that can also help create a fair equilibrium between protection and borrowing in fashion design.

This insightful Research Handbook discusses how exclusive intellectual property rights can affect inclusivity within individual, community and business contexts. It employs urban and rural frameworks to provide a multidimensional view of contemporary inclusivity and its relationship with intellectual property.