What Do You Get When You Buy a Book, Painting or CD?

Visual artists --in this case, Thomas Seddon --forever maintain rights of integrity of their work.

When you buy a book, CD, or painting, you own the physical object, but you do not own the intellectual property of the author, composer, performer or artist who created that object. Your property rights in that object are limited by the continued rights of the creator, who is called the 'author' in copyright law even if the object is a scupture or painting or song. Those limits depend on exactly what the object is and how it relates to the author's intellectual property rights.

If you own a physical book, you can sell that book, burn it, or throw it away, because the creative intellectual property within it is intangible. The words of the story reside in the author's head, and the physical book itself is a fungible object. If you burn the book, you do no harm to the author's intellectual property rights in their story. What you can't do is lift the words out of the book and use them elsewhere during the time period that copyright still applies to those words -- usually the life of the author plus 70 years, but there are many variations on this. So you can't quote those words or incorporate them into your own story, song or movie; you can't put those words on a t-shirt or coffee mug and sell it. But the physical book itself -- go ahead and start the woodstove with it if you want, there's no harm done to the writer's rights.

The physical book--that is, the paper, ink, glue and bindings--were the physical property of the publisher or distributor, and those rights were relinquished when you bought the book. Digital books are another story. Purchasing an eBook on your Kindle, iPhone or computer comprises buying a right to access and read digital files containing intellectual property. There is nothing physical to own. You can't resell an electronic book as there is no physical property -- you've just paid for the right to look at the intellectual property with no physical object being involved. The costs of producing an electronic book are much lower than a print book, so you usually get to read the material at a lower cost, and the author usually gets a far higher royalty payment since the publisher doesn't have to buy paper and ink and glue and pay to ship the physical tomes. However, you do give up that rights of physical ownership of an object that comes along with a print-on-paper book, such as resale or starting fires.

CDs are much like books, and digital music downloads much like eBooks. You can spraypaint your CDs to use as Christmas ornaments if you like, because you are not damaging the intellectual property of the composer or performer. A digital download is the right to listen to the music, and you can not legally transfer those digital music files. The difference between eBooks and digital music files isn't the law -- it's just custom and practice. People transfer digital music files all the time, because the music industry did a piss-poor job of developing means of restricting those transfers. Electronic books came along a little bit later than digital music files (probably because writers are not quite as tech-savvy as musicians) and the publishing industry giants devised a way to introduce eBooks though methods designed to limit subsequent transfers, like proprietary eReader software.

Posters and tshirts and coffee mugs with pictures of paintings on them -- say, Starry Night, or Guernica, or one of Miro's brightly colored lines -- are the functional equivalent of a print book. You can smash them, sell them, tear them up -- because you own the physical property, and the artwork on them is in fungible, commercially mass produced form. Not so with an original artwork.

When you buy an original painting or sculpture, your rights in that physical object are limited quite differently than with a book or CD. While the intellectual property of the book or CD resides in the author's head, the intellectual property of the visual arts resides in the physical expression of the artist's ideas. The manuscript for a painting, in other words, is not in the artist's head but on the canvas. You have purchased a piece of the artist's brain, and you do not have the right to destroy that piece of the artist's brain, because it's not yours.

In addition to the usual copyrights (if you own a painting, you can't sell posters and notecards with pictures of it), visual artists have 'droit morale' or continuing moral rights to the integrity of their works. These include the right of attribution and the right of physical integrity. You can't paint over the painter's name, attribute a painting or sculpture to another artist or yourself, and you can't hang it upside down, paint over it, burn it, or cut the arms off the sculpture. The artist can sue you to stop you from doing so, or seek damages if it's already done. Public agencies in recent years have been successfully sued by artists for, example, repainting a mobile to match the renovated decor of an airport, or cutting the toy gun off a sculpture of kids playing and replacing it with a more politically correct hose nozzle. The physical artwork is done, finished, complete, and you can't change it. You can stuff it in a storage room if you no longer like its looks, but you can't change it.

Original art is usually far more expensive than books or CDs for exactly this reason, you are buying physical custody of the actual intellectual property work, and it is not a fungible item. If you destroy it, the intellectual property creation is gone, as opposed to burning the book but the story remains intact. Buying artwork is then an awesome responsibility -- you are the caretaker or custodian of the piece, and are forever legally entwined with the artist.