ARTISTS RIGHTS NEWS | ARTISTS, TECHNOLOGY AND THE OWNERSHIP OF CREATIVE CONTENT

The Artists Rights Foundation, together with U.S.C.'s Annenberg School of Communication, School of Fine Arts, and Law School, sponsored a major national conference on ownership and control of creative property. Titled "Artists, Technology, and Ownership of Creative Content," the conference was held in Los Angeles in the spring of 2001. The focus of the conference was how technology, such as digitization, affects the ownership and control of creative property. The conference explored who should have rights to use and change works of creative property and under what circumstances, with an emphasis on how these issues arise in film, music, and the visual arts. The conference brought together artists, performers, producers, distributors, and scholars from many different disciplines to discuss this vital topic. Leading national experts presented cutting-edge issues concerning control of creative content, and a series of panels was held, discussing these problems from many different perspectives. Each panel included artists and performers, producers, practitioners, and scholars. 

A key feature of the conference was its interdisciplinary nature. In addition to considering many different types of arts, the conference brought together scholars from different fields, such as communications, economics, history, labor and intellectual property law. The conference also had an international focus, examining law and practices in the and throughout the world.

It is expected that the conference will lead to many published works, both scholarly and non-scholarly. For example, it is hoped that the problems and supporting materials will be published to facilitate further study and discussion. Also, this conference is seen as the first of several programs to explore issues concerning ownership and control of creative content.