Takeovers & Makeovers – Appropriation, Fair Use & Copyright

Takeovers & Makeovers, a symposium on appropriation rights in the digital era, takes place November 7th & 8th at The Berkeley Art Museum Theater at UC Berkeley. Here’s more on the event, which will includes a talk on Saturday by the Billboard Liberation Front on the subject of “Media Banditry in the Digital Age”.

This event will bring together artists, lawyers, art historians, and representatives from the information technology community to discuss the changing field of appropriation art in the wake of the emergence of new digital media technologies that have radically altered access to and manipulation of information. In the United States copyright is now automatic, and registration with the Copyright Office no longer required. Recent additions to copyright law such as the Digital Rights Management and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998) have further extended copyright protection by criminalizing the creation and dissemination of devices, technologies, and services that assist in circumventing copy protection, even when such circumventions do not violate copyright and remain within the shrinking purview of ‘fair use.’ Growing legal debates over file sharing have ensured that copyright violation and fair use are firmly entrenched popular topics in the media. These developments speak to the urgency of readdressing the ever-expanding reach of copyright and the limits it subsequently places on our right to critique, comment upon, and parody our culture. This conference aims to offer such a reassessment, and will also reconsider the history of appropriation in the arts and begin a cross-disciplinary discussion about the myriad repercussions of its increasing pervasiveness as a practice for the future.