The goal of the US Copyright Law is to promote the progress of knowledge and culture. Its best-known feature is protecting owners’ rights. However, copying, quoting, recontextualizing, and reusing existing cultural material can be critically important to creating and spreading knowledge and culture.
Copyright lasts for a limited time, and then works enter the public domain, where they are free for use by all. Other limitations allow the use of works protected by copyright without permission or payment to the copyright owner. Without those uses, creative and scholarly activities would suffer, and the public would lose out on important new work that builds on the past.
How do you get copyright? Automatically! As soon as you create something, it is under copyright! Registering your work with the US Copyright Office you’ll add claim to your copyright, particularly in a court of law. A few exceptions exist for work created for the government or for hire. However, in most cases, if you sell your work, you still retain the copyright.
Copyright lasts the life of the artist/architect and 70 years after their death.
US Copyright Law defines an “architectural work” as the design of a building as embodied in any tangible medium of expression, including a building, architectural plans, or drawings. The work includes the overall form as well as the arrangement and composition of spaces and elements in the design but does not include individual standard features.
The scope of exclusives rights in architectural works subject to certain limitations:
The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work, if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place.
The owners of a building embodying an architectural work may, without the consent of the author or copyright owner of the architectural work, make or authorize the making of alterations to such building, and destroy or authorize the destruction of such building. (17 U.S. Code § 120, Cornell Law School) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/120
In most countries, including the United States, the copyright protection for architectural works typically lasts for the architect's life plus 70 years. After this period, the work enters the public domain and can be used freely by others.
Adolf Loos's copyrighted materials became public in 2008, over 75 years after his death. However, his copyright journey was extremely complicated.
In 1922, Adolf Loos wrote a will, leaving his entire property to his second wife, Elsie Altmann.
In 1925, Adolf Loos told his collaborators and friends, Heinrich Kulka and Grete Hentschel, to "burn" his documents because he was planning a new career in Paris. They don’t.
In 1930, Kulka and Henschell kept documents to prepare a monograph for Loos. Adolf Loos agreed to the publication, and photographer Martin Gerlach was commissioned to photograph all of Loos's work, including the model for House Josephine Baker.
Adolf Loos died in 1933. In 1938, Elise Altmann was at the height of her career as Vienna's Operetta. Traveling at the beginning of WWII, she could not return and accept Loos's inheritance. Ludwig Munz, an art historian and friend of Loos, took the collection and systematized Loos's assets.
During WWII, Ludwig Munz took the collection to London with the help of RIBA Librarian Edward Carter. Adolf Loos's documents and portfolios were stored at the RIBA Archive until 1946. Ludwig Munz dies in 1957.
In 1966, Ludwig Gluck, editor and publisher of the writings of Adolf Loos, warned Walter Koschatzky that Elise Altmann had ownership claims to the Loos collection. Nevertheless, Koschatzky acquired the Loos collection from the heirs of Ludwig Munz and archived the Albertina Museum in Vienna.
In 1980, Elise Altmann began legal disputes with Albertina, claiming her rights to the collection. Prof. Adolf Opel supported her claim. After her death, Altmann unofficially transferred all her rights to Opel and Gluck.
Gluck, Opel, Kulka, Henschell, and Albertina all claim rights to Adolf Loos's works. They agree that their collections and uses of this material aren’t assets under Loos's copyright.
References:
Weizman, Ines , and Armin Linke. “Repeat Yourself.” Centre for Documentary Architecture, January 18, 2020. https://documentary-architecture.org/archive/publications/repeat-yourself
Weizman, Ines. Architecture and Copyright: Loos, Law, and the Culture of the Copy. The 101st ACSA Annual Meeting Proceedings: New Constellations, New Ecologies. Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), 2013. https://www.acsa-arch.org/proceeding/101st-acsa-annual-meeting-proceedings-new-constellations-new-ecologies/
Artist may invoke Fair Use to incorporate copyrighted material into new artworks in any medium, subject to certain limitations:
Artists should avoid uses of existing copyrighted materials that do not generate new artist meaning, being aware that a change of medium, without more, may not meet this standard.
The use of a preexisting work, whether in part or in whole, should be justified by the artistic objective, and artists who deliberately repurpose copyrighted works should be prepared to explain their rationales for their use and the extent of their uses.
Artists should avoid suggesting that incorporated elements are their original work, unless that suggestion is integral to the meaning of the new work.
When copying another's work, an artist should cite the source =, whether in the new work or elsewhere (statement, labeling or embedding), unless there is an aesthetic basis for not doing so.
Did the use “transform” the copyrighted material by using it for a purpose significantly different from that of the original, or did it do no more than provide consumers with a “substitute” for the original?
After a decade at Modern Photography, Patricia Caulfield became its executive editor in 1964. In the June issue that year, Caulfield's photo of an arrangement of blossoms in Barbados appeared with an article.
Andy Warhol called the magazine, wanting to buy the image, but he felt the price was too high. According to the lawsuit Ms. Caulfield filed in November 1966, he clipped the picture from the magazine, cropped it, and produced silk screen paintings for what became his “Flowers” series, first shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery in Manhattan in November 1964.
The “Flowers” series became one of Andy Warhol's most renowned and commercially successful works of art. Warhol appropriated, cropped, flattened, and distorted the image, rendering it boldly graphic. By reproducing the same image in large quantities, he obtained a decorative effect, similar to wallpaper, transmitting the aura of 1960s consumerism and advertising.
As part of a settlement that Ms. Caulfield and Warhol eventually reached, he created two new “Flowers” paintings for her (the Castelli gallery would sell them for $6,000). He agreed to pay her a 25 percent share of the royalties derived from a portfolio of “Flowers” prints.
Other stolen, appropriated, and fair uses cases by Andy Warhol: Life magazine photographer, Henri Dauman's photo of Jackie Kennedy. Photographer Lynn Goldsmith’s photo of Prince. Photographer Gene Korman's photo of Marilyn Monroe.
References:
College Art Association, and Peter Jaszi. Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, College Art Association (2015). https://www.collegeart.org/programs/caa-fair-use/best-practices