Archive of Henry Lydiate‘s Artlaw column, published in Art Monthly since 1976. Have a legal question about your career? Check our Directory or send us a legal query.
Lost in Translation
Plagiarism and copyright infringement are often misunderstood as being the same, but are not: they may overlap, but are separate wrongs. Plagiarism is a violation of ethical norms and policies, typically in academic and professional disciplines, but…
A Complete Unknown
The 97th Oscar awards were presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on 2 March 2025 in Los Angeles, honouring movies released in 2024. Nominated in eight Oscar categories, A Complete Unknown is a…
Copyrightability
Many governments worldwide are currently seeking to keep pace with the impact – on their economies, infrastructures and industries – of AI developments and innovations. In the visual art ecosystem, two challenging issues are being faced: whether AI generated…
Copyright and AI Consultation
The year is barely a month old and already 2025 is being variously described by digital technologists worldwide as: ‘A Year of AI Hype and Quiet Evolution’, ‘Maybe the Year of AI Legislation: Will We See…
Smarter Artists’ Funding
The UK’s Autumn Budget 2024 promulgated government’s fiscal policies and plans aimed at establishing economic foundations for its mission of ‘national renewal’ over the next five years. Many suggestions and proposals have been made in recent months…
40 Years of Collecting
During 2024, the UK’s Design and Artists Copyright Society, DACS, celebrates forty years of operations. DACS is a not for profit share rights management organisation that champions, protects and manages the intellectual property rights of visual…
This Is Not by Me
Keith Haring’s last canvas painting continues to be the focus of intense social media controversy in these first months of 2024, triggered by an X tweeted image of the work’s purported completion using generative AI…
Freedom and Creativity
2024 started with publication of a seminal judicial decision confirming that UK copyright law’s originality test – for creating a copyright protected new artwork – requires the expression of personal creativity by the author; and that this…
Cash In Your Face
In August 2023, within hours of Donald Trump’s police booking photograph being published by the Fulton County Sheriff in Atlanta, Georgia, his campaign website was selling his mugshot branded mugs, T shirts, drink coolers, bumper stickers,…
Fair Appropriation Practices
Warholisation was explored in the previous column, in which reported on the US Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in May 2023 that Andy Warhol’s appropriation of a photographer’s copyright image in his artwork, used without prior permission, was…
Warholisation
In May 2023, a landmark court decision was published addressing the lawfulness of artists appropriating into their works other artists’ pre existing images. The Supreme Court of the United States decided the case, which was brought by the Andy…
AI Art Tools
In January 2023 an unprecedented lawsuit was filed in a US Federal Court by three US based visual artists. It is a ‘class action’ comprising separate claims by three artists, who bound themselves into a single lawsuit…
Trademark or Copyright?
Towards the end of 2022, a significant judicial decision tackled a longstanding discussion within intellectual property law circles: whether copyright and registered trademark protections can apply simultaneously to the same image. Such questioning was the focus of…
The Unasked Question
‘Where there’s a hit, there’s a writ’ – so goes an old music business saying that may also apply in the art business. Significant financial gains by hit makers in the art world sometimes trigger lawsuits by…
Get Minted
2021 saw NFTs flooding into the contemporary art ecosystem; but will 2022 see their arrival as a welcome cornucopia of plenty or an unwanted pandora’s box of unforeseen pestilence? A selected survey of the current NFT landscape, keeping…
It’s a Wrap
Until 3 October 2021 a live stream from Paris shows the Arc de Triomphe entirely wrapped in fabric: a project conceived by artists Christo and Jeanne Claude over 60 years ago, which they developed and financed, but…
No Heirs Apparent
‘Millions of artists create; only a few thousands are discussed or accepted by the spectator and many less again are consecrated by posterity.’ So contended Marcel Duchamp in his talk on ‘the creative act’ in 1957 at…
A Curious Act of Vandalism
In June 2021 an accused vandal, who admitted spray painting a publicly sited sculpture by Antony Gormley, was found not guilty of committing an offence of criminal damage because the jury accepted the accused’s defence…