Hacker News Reader

Comment by wiredfool | Hacker News Reader

The buyers aren't spending 90k for a print of an Instagram, they're spending 90k for Richard Prince's signature on the bottom. Richard Prince could appropriate anything at this point, make a very limited edition, sign it, and mint money.

You couldn't, I couldn't, but he can.

View on HN

Under your theory, assuming I was famous, could I make a copy of a movie, sign the DVD copy and sell it for $100 free and clear?

I don't think I'd get away with that, so why should he?

What if I bought the DVD, got it signed by you and sold it for $100? Replace DVD with guitars, T-Shirts etc, definitely seen that happening.

With the items there's no copyright. With the DVD there is. The studio owns the copyright to the "image" on the DVD that was copied.

I guess the big question is does what he has done to the images count as derivative works or not? I say not, since he's used the image unmodified.

I hope at $90k a sale it catches the attention of a pro bono for a nice test case. Would be interesting to see what the courts say.

I think he will be in trouble if this gets tested. Just my thoughts. I don't see how he can defend that.

There's an important extension that isn't clearly visible, which is the commodity aspect. When there's an established market for an artist, the financial success (see headline) is a necessary signal that the artist's market is healthy.

Everything else is more or less secondary, both to the market and to the artist as product and manufacturer. In other words, a lost/settled/won lawsuit is not a liability for him.

Unlike you, he has won a lawsuit to that effect. Also, he has sold similar appropriations for far more money, so there's a framing effect as to what they're worth.

He won that lawsuit because that work was transformative. I think it could be argued that his Instagram pieces are not.

But also, in that case, the copyrighted work was registered, allowing statutory damages. It's unlikely that these instagrams are registered, which reduces the potential award. In addition, there's likely no actual damages in terms of lost sales.

I think that he's got a pretty good chance that he'd win based on the history, and lower damages in the case of a loss. (Not registered, not otherwise commercial work, no potential loss of sales for original)

He put some emojis on it, that's why.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com