The Space Between

Copyright Issues

In a video uploaded to the video sharing site YouTube, Kansas State anthropology professor Michael Wesch suggests that one of the traditions digital text forces us to rethink is copyright. Three writers took up the issue of authorial property in the February 2007 issue of Harper’s, demonstrating that notions of who owns ideas have changed in response to the spread of hypertext technologies. The first article was written by photography Sue Meiselas and painter Joy Garnet and tells the story of the dissemination of the Molotov Man image thanks to the Web. The second article, by Jeremy Lethem, plays with Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence.”

The story of the Molotov Man image began in Nicaragua in 1979 when Sue Meiselas photographed a Sandinista fighter throwing a burning Pepsi bottle. Less than a year later, reproductions of that photograph began appearing on things like matchbox covers and posters. For 20 years, the Molotov Man image spread around Nicaragua as the symbol for the revolution until Garnet “found” the image in 2003 and turned it into a painting (57). Not long after she began showing the painting, Garnet received a letter from Meiselas’ lawyer asking that Garnet seek permission every time she wanted to reproduce the painting.

Fearing a possible lawsuit, Garnet removed a digital copy of the Molotov Man painting from her Web site, but it was already too late. Web users had already appropriated the image. Reproductions and derivative works circulated freely around the Web.

Neither of the women foresaw that outcome. It was a surprise to Garnet, but it was something of an insult to Meiselas’ ideals. She writes that, for her, the issue was not so much one of copyright but one of context. She sees her role as a photographer to be the opposite of Garnet’s role as painter. Where Garnet seeks to decontextualize an image, Meiselas contextualizes it (56). Meiselas understands all too well the ease with which an image or a text can be decontextualized in the Internet age, but she takes a stand. She says “if history is working against the context, then we must, as artists, work all the harder to reclaim the context. We owe this debt of specificity not just to one another but to our subjects, with whom we have an implicit contract” (58).

But Meiselas does not address who owns the rights to that image. Does she, the original photographer, own it? If she does have a valid claim to that image, what exactly does she lay claim to? All derivative works? Since Garnet created a new image from her photograph, is that new image necessarily related to the original? The question goes double for those derivative works created in the digital realm and posted via hypertext to the Web, where those secondary and tertiary artists may have no idea where their starting image came from. When the medium crosses from the tangible to the intangible, does an artist’s claim become any less valid? The same questions can be asked about other forms of art, like literature and music. When does imitation cross the line into intellectual trespassing?