Thought You Should See This

January 12, 2012

Wait. What year is this? Surely the story, Velvet Underground Sues Warhol Foundation isn’t contemporary? You know, what with the band no longer existing and Andy Warhol being long dead? Not so. Turns out, the group’s founding musicians Lou Reed and John Cale filed a complaint in Manhattan on January 11th, 2012, arguing that Warhol’s foundation infringed the design that adorned their epically brilliant album, The Velvet Underground and Nico “by licensing it to third parties.”

I can’t tell whether the musicians want to free the banana back to the public domain from whence they argue it came, or if they simply want a slice of the banana proceedings. But it certainly raises questions about the provenance, use of graphic imagery and other copyright laws. And while it might seem trivial to some, there are real financial issues at stake here. As the Bloomberg story reports: “Warhol’s copyrighted works have a market value of $120 million and the foundation has earned more than $2.5 million a year licensing rights to those works.”

Much of the argument seems to have been sparked by the decision by the Warhol Foundation to license the banana image for a series of iPhone and iPad cases, sleeves and bags, as reported in the New York Times last year. What was there a fluffy style piece has now become a matter of litigation, surely not the first time we’ll see such action in a newly digitally driven world.

An aside. The screenshot shown here is taken from my own digital copy of the album. Does that infringe someone’s rights? I’m honestly not sure.

[Story via Rob Walker.]

10:47am | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZLv7dxEfGUqn
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(Notes: 15)