Last week, Professor Eva Subotnik presented her paper, The Fine Art of Rummaging: Successors and the Life Cycle of Copyright, at the annual IP Scholars Conference (IPSC), hosted this year by DePaul College of Law.
The paper will be published as a chapter in The Research Handbook on Art and Law (Jani McCutcheon & Fiona McGaughey eds., Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, forthcoming 2019). Here is the abstract:
This chapter argues that a possible justification for the extension of copyright beyond the death of the author is the key role that copyright successors may serve in the life cycle of artistic works. In particular, with respect to an artist’s unpublished work, a time-sensitive decision must be made about whether or not to keep the physical artifacts associated with copyrights—an obligation that often falls to these successors. Bulky canvases, sketches, negatives, and myriad other items must be sifted through in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. In this way, the post-death cleanup period offers a once-in-a-lifetime event in which copyright successors can serve a socially valuable function.
