ABSTRACT
Street art is having a moment. Once criminalized and ardently combatted by city governments, street art has become a persistent presence in metropolitan cities, social media feeds, and even art galleries. Often coming in the form of graffiti murals applied to the exterior-facing walls of a building, these works are racking up significant price tags at auction houses and are raising property values in proximate areas. And yet, despite street art’s recent legitimization by the Second Circuit in a historic decision allowing the recovery of significant statutory damages upon the destruction of a work of recognized stature, a loophole in US copyright law threatens to jeopardize these strides. This Note delves into the conflict between the copyright protections of buildings and the copyright protections for the street art painted on them …
Emma C Peplow, Paint on Any Other Canvas: Closing a Copyright Loophole for Street Art on the Exterior of an Architectural Work, 70 Duke Law Journal 885-929 (2021).
First posted 2020-12-18 13:52:58
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