I Have Plagiarized

In honor of Hal Davis’ 1985 court case, Hannah Ross has taken famous contemporary works and copied them. Without altering the images in any manner, she converted the digital images to computer code, and displayed the code. There is a grey area when it comes to US copyright law; because a derivati... Read more

In honor of Hal Davis’ 1985 court case, Hannah Ross has taken famous contemporary works and copied them. Without altering the images in any manner, she converted the digital images to computer code, and displayed the code. There is a grey area when it comes to US copyright law; because a derivative work is allowed to attain copyright on the basis that the original was creatively altered. But the extent of alteration and what constitutes “creativity” is vague. An additional technicality is that in order to begin a derivative work, you must be granted permission by the owner: “only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or to authorize someone else to create, a new version of that work.” The act of creation itself is the infringement. So these works are in violation of copyright law because they are identical to the originals, but are just read in a different visual format.