Eva E. Subotnik, of St. John’s University School of Law, has made available for download her article “Dead-Hand Guidance: A Preferable Testamentary Approach for Artists”, published in the St. John’s Legal Studies Research Paper No. 22-0005. The abstract is as follows:
Postmortem copyrights in the United States allow for the control of art long after the artist has died. Successors to these interests, and even the public generally, may have bona fide reasons to encourage visual artists to be specific and comprehensive about the ways in which artwork is to be reproduced and used after the artists’ deaths. Nevertheless, this chapter cautions that efforts to encourage visual artists to provide guidance should simultaneously discourage any attempts to make these instructions binding. First, it is not clear that purportedly binding testamentary instructions about these matters will be effective. Second, the proliferation of such instructions may run counter to the goals of copyright law, raising the question of whether they should be effective. In short, in these matters, dead-hand guidance is preferable to dead-hand control.
To see the full article, click: “Dead-Hand Guidance: A Preferable Testamentary Approach for Artists”
Posted by Marin Larkin, Associate Editor, Wealth Strategies Journal.
Wealth Strategies Journal 