Upcoming Events

Who owns ideas? What makes the cultural artifacts of our time unique?

While issues of fair use, appropriation, and copyright are relatively recent preoccupations within the design professions, they have arguably always been an aspect of artistic work, and only increasingly so following the advent of mechanical and digital modes of reproduction.
How are the disciplinary and legal boundaries that describe creative innovation articulated today? Is it necessary to assume that originality and appropriation are opposed?

Part of the Daniels Fora series, The Status of the New will explore the relationship between originality and invention in creative work. Our featured speakers — Amy Adler, Emily Kempin Professor of Law at New York University’s School of Law; and Winnie Wong, Assistant Professor in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley and author of Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade — will discuss the status of novelty in an era when appropriation is the norm.
Their discussion with be co-moderated by Sarah Hirschman, Lecturer at the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, whose work has explored issues of copying and copyright in architecture, and Richard Sommer, Dean and Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.