“Rip Me to Pieces!"
Ines Duhanic, LL.M. (Stockholm)
Data Protection Officer | Corporate Privacy Counsel 💻🔒 | IP Law💡 Enthusiast | D&I Advocate
Oxford University Press has published today my newest article “Rip Me to Pieces! No Moral Copyright Protection for the Destruction of Site-Specific Art in Germany” in GRUR International, a well-established, peer-reviewed journal focusing on IP and Competition Law.
In this opinion, I analyze the ground-breaking installation art case “HHole” of Germany’s highest court of civil and criminal jurisdiction – the German Federal Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof) - from the German copyright perspective while also comparing the case to the graffiti case “5Pointz” of the US Circuit Court of Appeals in New York from early this year.
In particular, the article stresses: “While the general inclusion of destruction into the scope of protection seems like a bright line in the abstract, its practical application has turned out to be anything but straightforward, particularly in cases of what the Court calls “works of art that are inextricably linked to buildings.”
After highlighting also the ready-made-phenomenon (Can a simple hole on the wall qualify as copyright work?), I also criticize the general exclusion of one of the most important art genres of our time, installation art, which is by definition always site-specific.
You can access the current issue here: