It’s not uncommon for artists to settle disputes out of court to avoid protracted litigation. For instance, in 1980 Robert Rauschenberg settled with photographer Morton Beebe after discovering that his photograph was used in Rauschenberg’s seminal work Pull (1974). The agreement included $3,000 and a copy of the work. Whether for financial or PR reasons, [...]

Willem B. pointed me towards a great post by David Bollier from On The Commons. It explores transformative literature via a mashup of Nabokov’s Lolita and Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas. Otto Lambert’s A Tangle of Thorns Or, the Fair Use of the Commons in a Transformative World “improbably manages to blend the warped, [...]

Over 1,200 works from the Polaroid Collection of Photography are headed to auction at Sotheby’s on June 21/22, 2010. The works are being liquidated by order of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Minnesota. Proceeds from the auction, estimated at upwards of $11.5 million, will be paid to the creditors of the defunct [...]

I’m a little late on this one, but if you are interested in the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) effort to thwart peer-to-peer file sharing, Steal This Film is well worth 51 minutes of your time. The documentary chronicles Swedish (and international) piracy culture with a focus on members of The Pirate Bay (TPB). [...]

NPR recently featured the band Pomplamoose on its weekend edition of All Things Considered. The San Francisco duo, comprised of Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn, has become a YouTube phenomenon for its vibrant cover songs. One such example is the Pomplamoose cover of Lady Gaga’s Telephone: Apart from garnering millions of views since launching PomplamooseMusic, [...]