Protecting Art in the Street: A Guide to Copyright in Street Art and Graffiti, by Enrico Bonadio. Stockholm: Dokument Forlag

Abstract

Graffiti has impressively remained a cool esthetic for the best part of fifty years. This is a consistency in fashion-ability only bettered by sunglasses. Given the global popularity, commercial use and institutional acceptance coupled with the ambiguity of its legal status, the question of graffiti and copyright is one that should attract anyone with an interest in the politics, economics and practise of popular and everyday culture today. Copyright at first may appear to be a contradiction to an idealized spirit of the graffiti writer apparently ‘gifting’ their work to the demos in the service of political transformation (Riggle 2010). However, as a critical frame it allows us to consider, from a legal perspective, what happens to this writing and image making. Enrico Bonadio is an attorney and lectures on intellectual property law. Following The Cambridge Handbook of Copyright in Street Art and Graffiti (Bonadito 2019), this is a distilled, straightforward and more accessible guide to some of the key issues, paradoxes, and the limited but growing case law in the area of graffiti and street art and copyright. Throughout, the corporate co-opting of the form by the fashion, food and tourist industries is acknowledged. No longer a simple act of illegality, street art has become the visual sign of gentrification. While artists have been recognized as a tool of gentrification (Rich 2019), the graffiti writers and street artists attack on the urban space positions them as the unwitting shock troops of gentrification (Andron 2018). Shock troops by definition take heavy losses and the value of this text is the clarity it offers the often-precarious creators to navigate the legalities of their practice to defend their often-vulnerable work. As an art form clouded by legal opacity, the mechanics of remuneration, reproduction and preservation all raise the specter of copyright. Bonadio bypasses the usual extended deliberation on the esthetic distinctions between graffiti and street art. Instead, they are considered together, as under his lens of copyright this is deemed an insignificant distinction. Also overlooked is the potential costs of considering graffiti and street art in terms of copyright. Copyright can be seen to symbolize the end of the form and its cool status insofar as it heralds a final commodification and institutionalization antithetical to its history. For a deeper discussion on the relationship of graffiti and the law, it is worth considering the recent literature in this area (Iljadica 2016; Baldini 2018 and Bonadio’s aforementioned edited volume). This a short jargon-free, image rich, introduction and the key concepts are illustrated with accessible examples that will be of particular interest to writers and artists. Where originality is a criterion for copyright, considerations such as quality, anti-establishment content or external placement are no barriers. Bonadio explains, “Street artists and writers can, if they so wish, rely on copyright to protect their art—no matter where it is placed” (13). What then of illegal work? Bonadio is less definitive. In principle, illegality does not, he believes, void copyright protection but this is a “grey area” and difficult to gauge as writers and artists alike risk exposure in the attempt to enforce copyright protection. Likewise, Bonadio is clear that ephemerality is no obstacle to copyright protection. With