Last week Professor Eva Subotnik participated in two Boston area conferences.
On Friday, February 27th, she participated in a roundtable at Harvard Law School on “Copyright’s Afterlife: Law, Legacy, and Ownership.” As described:
This expert roundtable will address important aspects of the post-mortem afterlife of copyright and explore tools and remedies for identifying and rectifying misuses of authors’ creative legacies and ensuring that those legacies are managed in accordance with the wishes of the authors. Invited participants will include playwrights and other theater professionals, as well as scholars from law, the arts, and other disciplines.
On Saturday, February 28th, Professor Subotnik presented her paper, “Roll the Credits?: Why Attribution Works Differently in Sculpture and Film,” co-written with art historian Sharon Hecker, at the 2026 Works-in-Progress Intellectual Property (WIPIP) Colloquium at Boston University School of Law. The paper has been accepted for a special thematic issue of Sculpture Journal on sculpture as a collective practice, c. 1850-1950. Here is the abstract:
As any twenty-first century moviegoer knows, the last ten minutes of every film is the same: a chance to see the hundreds of people who worked on the movie. The situation with sculpture is different. While a growing body of art historical research shows that many specialized hands are involved in sculpture’s production, many of these figures remain unknown or are only recently emerging. Furthermore, the development of legal frameworks for attribution in sculpture—as between the sculptor or the skilled hands that physically made the work—has lagged.
In this article, we consider several reasons for this discrepancy. One possibility lies with the physical constraints of the media themselves and their ability to support multitudinous claims of credit. Another possibility is that it was more difficult to break free from well-established norms concerning authorship and attribution with respect to a more established medium like sculpture; the newness of film offered the chance to think about these topics with fresh eyes.
We seek to explore these possibilities in the context of artistic practices and legal developments primarily within the United States from 1850 to 1950. We argue that as art history moves towards greater recognition of the hands that make the work, the law concerning sculpture can learn from its experience with film and become more nuanced with respect to collaborative artistic practices. Ultimately, we hope to shed light both on some important stories of the past and on the developing technologies of the future, especially 3D scanning and AI.