When you are a professional artist or painter and someone gets hurt while on your job, you may need to consider hiring an experienced attorney to represent you. There are certain regulations regarding painters, construction workers, architects, engineers and painters that must be followed in order to lower the risk of serious injuries. The New York State Labor Law, referred to as the Scaffold Law provides certain workers and painters who are injured in height related accidents some certain legal rights to pursue a lawsuit against an architect and/or property owner. If you are a professional artist or painter who has suffered an injury at work, an experienced attorney would be the best person to represent you.
The copyright law is one of the more complicated areas of the legal system. The purpose of copyright law is to promote creativity and the arts by giving creators the right to refrain from selling or copying their works. A copyright is considered to exist when a particular work of art, a book, movie, or song is produced by someone and is protected by copyright law. However, there are certain exclusive rights that may be included in a copyright, including the right to copy. Therefore, an artist who creates a painting, poem, or sculpture does not have the exclusive rights to sell, copy, or distribute the painting, or poem, in order for that work to be protected.
There are some exceptions to this general rule, such as when paintings are displayed in museums, galleries or public places. In these cases, the original painting is protected, even if it is protected under the now outdated concept of a copyright. For example, many famous paintings by artists such as Monet, Warhol and Braque were protected under an underlying copyright when they were originally sold. This is why some of the best pieces of art are still offered at auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
For the artist who creates a painting or sculpture, the artist rights are much less in some cases. When an artist creates a portrait, they have the right to a copyright but not the right to immediate monetary profits based on their portrait’s sale. If an artist wants to pursue monetary profits from their creation, it may be necessary to file for a copyright. This process can be expensive, time consuming, and complex for most artists. Therefore, many artists choose to wait until their work has aged and the possibility of profit is low.
Another type of exclusive rights granted to an artist under U.S. law is called moral rights. Moral rights are not recognized stature or a trademark, as it relates to art, but instead a person’s right to use their expression in a lawful fashion. This means that a mother can legally use her daughter’s image to illustrate a breastfeeding child in a book, magazine or periodical. In addition, her image can be used to illustrate the Virgin Mary in a necklace, hat, bracelet or other similar item.
When it comes to artistic works, copyright law does not recognize stature, i.e., the right to an economic benefit based on the creation of an artistic work. As an example, if an artist painted a painting and did not receive monetary compensation for their creation, the painting would not be protected by law as an artistic work. The owner of the copyright can sue the artist for any damages or legal fees. This is true even if the infringement was unintentional. If, for example, an aspiring painter decides to model their work after famous Americans such as Robert Frost or America’s First Lady, the model may still find themselves in legal trouble because of violating the model’s right to privacy.
Other types of exclusive rights associated with a copyrighted work under United States law include the right to reproduce the work or create derivative works based on the underlying copyrighted work. Also, the copyright owner has the right to limit the number of copies that can be made and sell those copies only to an authorized group. The owner of the underlying work has the exclusive right to license, rent, or lend their copyrighted work to others to use for their own creative efforts. This is why music labels can assert copyright protection on musical compositions while individual performers can do the same on personal audio recordings.
Because many legal issues are concerned with the ownership and control of materials, including literary and artistic works, in the modern era copyright protection is often necessary as a part of purchasing materials for use in the United States. In order to protect its interests the United States has enacted the Berne Convention, which provides that a copyright owner can bring suit in a U.S. court against the owner of a foreign work if that person sells, rents, or gives away their foreign work without authorization. While the Berne Convention goes beyond the protection of literary and artistic works in most traditional copyright cases, most traditional U.S. court cases that address foreign works of authors do not extend the Berne Convention to foreign works.
