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When months passed without a response, Detzner assumed they weren’t. So he was surprised when he spotted the New Yorker issue of May 10, 2004, at least six months after he’d made his query. The cover featured a large oil derrick in the foreground spouting blood–just like the one he’d painted–with four smaller derricks behind it. It was signed by Ana Juan, a Spanish artist whose work Detzner admired. “This came out, and I thought, damn,” he says. “The same oil derrick, the same blood gushing.” (A New Yorker rep declined to comment.) Detzner, whose reputation as a painter has been built on the cheeky appropriation of corporate icons like Mickey Mouse and the Pillsbury Doughboy (who he crucified), suddenly found himself on the other side of the copyright divide.
Although a work of art is automatically copyrighted the moment it’s created, Lingren says she usually advises clients to formally register. For a $45 filing fee, registration puts the world on notice that you’re the author of the work, puts you in position to sue if there’s infringement (in most cases you must register before filing suit), and gives you a crack at a higher award.
“It’s OK to copy!” was the rallying cry of video artist and wild man Phil Morton, who joined the faculty of the School of the Art Institute in 1969 and created what would become SAIC’s Department of Film, Video, and New Media as well as the nation’s first BA and MFA programs in video studies. “Believe in the process of copying . . . with all your heart,” he wrote. “Copying is as good as any other way of getting ‘there.’” In the early 1970s Morton hooked up with UIC physicist and artist Dan Sandin, creator of the Sandin Image Processor (a sort of Moog synthesizer for video), in the promulgation of the Distribution Religion, a philosophy of sharing that was a precursor to today’s open-source movement. Sandin made the plans for his processor available to anyone who would pledge to keep any improvement they made on it free as well, and Morton promoted a general anticopyright ethic he called “Copy-It-Right,” the granddaddy of efforts like Copy Left and Creative Commons. Morton died in 2003, but professor Jon Cates has brought his work back to SAIC in the newly established Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive. In celebration of its opening, Cates will present a selection of Morton’s work Thursday, February 15, at the Siskel Center.
