[weinzierl]

>> Having once claimed that copyright is for losers, Banksy has been ramping up his legal position for several months now. At the end of 2018, the artist’s handling service Pest Control took action against an Italian company that organised an exhibition, The Art of Banksy—A Visual Protest, for Milan’s Mudec Museum.

>> In February this year, the judge ruled in favour of Banksy’s request for all merchandise bearing his name to be removed from the museum’s shop, but promotional materials using his name were allowed to remain. The judge noted that the documents filed in the proceedings showed a limited use of the Banksy brand.

Banksy should have GPL'd his works. Seriously.

Everyone creating artwork derived from Banksy's works, including merchandise articles, would be required to provide the sources. So if for example an Italian Museum decides to sell flower bomber T-shirts everyone could just use the design files to order at CafePress. This would promote the unrestricted dissemination of his works while putting natural limits on the commercialization by others.

[aritmo]

You probably mean "Creative Commons", not GPL. GPL is for code.

But in either case, both CC and GPL are based on copyright, therefore cannot use.

[weinzierl]

CC-SA (share-alike) would be in the same spirit and more suitable for artwork I guess, but I'm not very familiar with it.

Why can't he use copyright? I didn't quite follow this line of thinking in the original article as well. As far as I understand it copyright per se is automatic (nowadays), so you don't have to file for it. So this doesn't prevent him from staying anonymous.

Tradmarks on the other hand have to be registered. How does he hide his anonymity in this case?

Now enforcing his rights is a completely different matter. He certainly can't hide his name from the courts then and it might even become public. But in this case there is no difference between a copyright lawsuit and a trademark lawsuit.

[cookie_monsta]

The way that I understand it, a trademark can be registered to a CPL (UK equivalent to an LLC) but copyright, if registered, has to go to a person. Although I believe that some states in the US allow anonymous copyright via LLC.

I am far from being a lawyer, but this makes sense to me - a trademark is designed to be associated with a brand, copyright is designed to designate a person/group as something's creator.

[arrrg]

But I thought you don’t have to register copyright? I thought you just had it automatically as soon as you make something?

[em-bee]

it's not registering copyright that is the problem, but claiming a copyright violation that requires revealing of his identity, because in order to make the claim you have to prove that you have legal standing to do so.

[kabacha]

> GPL is for code.

Citation needed. GPL can work for anything.

[duskwuff]

The text of the GPL describes the subject of the license as a "Program" and refers to it as having "machine-readable source code" (or "Corresponding Source" in GPLv3) and an "object code or executable form". It's difficult to interpret what any of this would mean in the context of an artistic work.

[abdullahkhalids]

There are only recommendations, nothing is forced.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOtherThanSoftwa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Tex...

[mkj]

Maybe AGPL, which would scare more companies?