• Seems that New York City’s recent bill forcing schools to report out on the availability of arts education in its schools comes not a moment too soon: an audit from the state comptroller found that roughly half of seniors graduated from high school without having met arts education requirements.
• Denver is out with a bold new seven-year cultural plan, “Imagine 2020.” Among other things, it seeks to “increase the visibility of local and creative talent” by inventorying and ranking the availability of the arts in all neighborhoods, and supporting micro-art projects that can create new gathering spaces across the city.
• A federal court has ordered Google to remove the infamous “Innocence of Muslims” film from YouTube after an actress who appears on screen for only five seconds – and was told she was appearing in an adventure movie – asserted that posting the film against her wishes violates her copyright in her performance. The injunction is preliminary; Google is appealing.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The two latest articles to document artists’ struggle to make ends meet, even once they are established: on writers in London and artists in New York City.
• Hooray for practicing what you preach: the Hewlett Foundation takes stock of the two strategies of its Effective Philanthropy program – and announces that it will wind down and replace the one that the evidence suggests wasn’t working.
• Aditi Kapil from Minneapolis’s Mixed Blood Theater Company unpacks lessons from the company’s free ticket initiative, such as the idea that infrastructure costs make “free cheaper than cheap.” And thanks to to a new grant, all visitors to the Wilma Theater can now enjoy $25 tickets during the first four weeks of a show’s run. The newly flattened price structure will be in place for three years.

IN THE FIELD

• The Future of Music Coalition has been quizzing musicians on their knowledge of current copyright law, and the results are mixed, suggesting “there remains widespread confusion about the difference between musical composition and sound recordings” and musicians are generally unaware of “the changes in the digital landscape that have altered the way that money flows back to creators.”
• After managing to squeeze twelve years out of what was intended to be a three-year program, the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program ended with its final fellows last November.
• Getty Images has released 35 million photos to be used freely for non-commercial purposes, bowing to widespread, often ignorant infringement of its images. There are a few catches: the interface is clunkier than for paying customers, Getty can track usage data, and they reserve the right to put ads in the embedded image viewer. Now that we’ve liberated images and music, are books and movies next?
• Yes, data-driven decisions can come from cocktail napkins: Nina Simon offers a nifty example of how a simple measure of “success” can help draw comparisons across programs.
• The new performing arts center planned for the World Trade Center site, in the works for over a decade, faces an uphill battle to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for construction with former mayor and big-ticket arts champion Michael Bloomberg no longer in office. The project will have to compete with several recently-opened theater spaces of similar size as well as the nearby 9/11 Memorial & Museum.

BIG IDEAS

• An example-driven look at how grantmakers are building innovation into their programs to tackle large social problems in Stanford Social Innovation Review pairs well with this examination by four Boston Consulting Group strategists of what nurtures the “evolvability” of big companies like Google and Netflix. Meanwhile, Andrew Taylor poaches more lessons from the for-profit world by examining what the “Minimum Viable Product” familiar to tech start-ups might mean for the arts.
• March 20 was both the first day of spring and the UN’s International Day of Happiness, co-sponsored this year by Grammy winner Pharrell Williams. The designation of the day was inspired in part by Bhutan’s embrace of Gross National Happiness as a critical indicator of the country’s health. Culture is one of the pillars of GNH, so Createquity readers have special reason to celebrate.
• The Future of Digital Longform Project is out with a whopper of a report on how “long” (i.e. 5,000+-word) pieces of nonfiction are evolving, what “designing a story” can mean, and how and if writers can hope to make money from these efforts.
• Digital platforms continue to creep into the edusphere, with the College Board announcing a plan to (finally) counter the overpriced SAT-prep industry via a partnership with Khan Academy, and EdX, the only major non-profit MOOC provider, expanding its list of course partners to include NGOs and nonprofits ranging from the Smithsonian to the IMF.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Egads! First we learn we can’t always trust research; then we learn we can’t always trust the research that tells us not to trust research.
• The UK’s cultural sector’s hiring practices unfairly stifle diversity, a report from Creative and Cultural Skills finds. CCS calls out a widespread preference for unpaid workers and a tendency to hire people already known to existing employees as particular problems.
• A new report from the National Center for Arts Research has found that well under half of directors of the nation’s largest art museum directors are female, and they earn roughly three-quarters the salaries of their male counterparts.
• Southern California’s “creative industries” are booming with roughly 1 of 7 jobs in the Los Angeles area tied to the creative sector, according to the 2013 Otis Report on the Creative Economy. However, the relationship between the report and the fiscal health of the arts sector — and the economic stability of artists in the region — is murky.
• The international art and antique market, meanwhile, is  almost back to pre-recession levels. The uptick, however, is more due to the rising cost of artwork rather than an increased number of sales, suggesting a continued and worrisome creep toward a “winner take all” economy.
• The Brookings Institute tried out a badass new research methodology — a “survey with placebo” — in a recent attempt to measure the impact of advocacy organizations on the passage of school choice legislation. The method is one of several new and intriguing practices in advocacy evaluation.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• The US Bureau of Economic Analysis, following new international standards, has adjusted the official method for calculating GDP to “include the amount of money business invest in … intellectual property.” This involves some tough calls: development costs for hit TV shows with potential for syndication and even greeting cards count, but journalism and blogs are deemed perishable. Some commentators interpret this as refreshing and official recognition of the economic value of creative productions.
• Back in April, Createquity explored what might happen if the federal tax deduction for charitable contributions went the way of the dodo. At the federal level, the debate rages on, but various states – including Hawaii, Minnesota and Kansas – have recently decided against capping charitable deductions within their states, citing negative impact on the nonprofit sector.
• Across the pond, it looks like economic arguments for the arts are becoming increasingly influential. Britain’s Culture Secretary preserved most of the UK’s £450m-plus culture budget in part by highlighting the arts’ role in driving economic growth. Not everyone is on board though: the Scottish Secretary of Culture responded by reminding Scots of this fall’s referendum on independence and declaring that Scotland “doesn’t measure the worth of culture and heritage solely in pounds and pence.” (Bonus: this recent post recaps the rise of “Art Works” justifications for subsidy in the US.)
• Why it’s important to pay attention to policy: an arts educator is California is “shocked” to learn his state requires the arts to be taught in schools. (Psst: so do forty-four others.)

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Darren Walker, currently a vice president of the Ford Foundation, has been named the foundation’s next president. His portfolio as VP covered arts & culture, and he was instrumental in the formation of the ArtPlace creative placemaking funder collaboration.
• Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight.Com and intellectual crush of data geeks everywhere, is leaving the New York Times for ESPN. Good news for baseball fans, bad news for political wonks, though Silver will continue to cover elections via ABC News.
• Don Rosenberg, longtime music critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has been laid off along with 49 other employees of the paper.

BIG IDEAS

• Americans for the Arts has launched a new project to study America’s 600+ “Cultural Districts,” updating their 1998 Cultural Districts Handbook. As part of the kickoff, they hosted a blog salon last week.
• Are organizations that eschew dynamic pricing “punishing [their] staff[s] in the service of an ideal the community may not be aware of“?
• FSG is launching a Next Generation Evaluation project. An initial post summarizes three long-held assumptions about evaluation and three “game-changing approaches” that could challenge them: Developmental Evaluation, Shared Measurement, and Big Data.
• With the backing of the Haas, Hewlett, and Packard Foundations, Shiree Teng has launched ImpactRising.org, a website designed “to help bring a level of standards to the consulting industry, to raise the quality of social sector consulting, and to to have some measure of accountability.” It includes tools and resources for organizations working with consultants and for consultants themselves.
• A scientist-turned-artist reflects on the differences between the two cultures.
  

  From funding levels (‘I write grant applications for research and it’s like taking an arts grant and adding a couple of zeros’) and the culture of peer review (‘It’s all about surviving the gauntlet of people trying to tear your ideas apart – that doesn’t happen with an arts audience’), to scrutinising outcomes (‘In science, they really care about the outcome of their funding – I don’t get the same impression in the arts’), institutionally, science and the arts are still very far apart.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• We know the Common Core State Standards aren’t cheap; states across the country are scrambling to figure out how much the newer, “smarter” tests will cost them. But beyond that, the Common Core is also prompting some borderline-creepy partnerships between for-profit and nonprofit educational entities. Beginning in 2014, the American Council of Education, which administers the GED, is joining forces with textbook giant Pearson. The upside? The GED is getting re-written to align with Common Core. The bad news? The cost of taking the GED will almost double. Way to reduce barriers to a high school diploma, guys.
• Hyperallergic has a helpful summary of five approaches artists have taken in attempts to guarantee fair wages and benefits. And while he doesn’t explicitly mention artists, Adam Davidson uses the example of a wannabe-hair-metal-rock-star-turned-accounting-“cliff jumper” to illustrate how hard it is to determine the financial value of ideas.
• Bloomberg Philanthropies announced in June a $15m, 3-year grant to 5 major cultural institutions to support the development of mobile apps. The Guggenheim recently released its free, Bloomberg-funded app; others will follow through the end of 2014.

IN THE FIELD

• Is this the future of professional conferences? The ever-intrepid Nina Simon recently hosted seventy-five designers, museum professionals and artists in the Santa Cruz Museum of Art for a 2.5 day “camp” for participants to “take a risk” in creating exhibits. Beyond sounding super fun, the experiment generated reflection about what “taking a risk” even means in a museum environment.
• Abe Flores (recent winner of Americans for the Arts’s Emerging Leader Award) shares his thoughts on the distressing lack of racial diversity among respondents to AFTA’s recent report on salaries in local arts agencies.
• While the fate of Detroit’s art collection is still up in the air, the Wall Street Journal offers two arguments for keeping the works where they are, and the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts insists it’s too soon to panic.
• Jon Silpayamanant writes about what declining attendance at sporting events – and the measures teams have taken to preserve revenues – can tell us about the similar problems faces by live performances in the arts.
• Meanwhile, demand for classical music on Pandora (and iTunes) has been growing – and outperforming the company’s expectations based on market share. But lest we get too excited about our digital saviors, Spotify – the streaming service that musicians love to hate – is hardly rolling in cash; those pitiful payments to artists offset nearly all of its equally-pitiful revenues.
• Allan Kozinn chronicles the “sea change” in music conservatories as courses are added in the business of music, covering the use of digital technologies, the art of networking, and how to build a personal brand as part of a career.

RESEARCH CORNER

• This puts a twist on arguments touting the economic impact of the arts: new research from the Corporation for National and Community Service indicates people who volunteer their time with organizations have a 27 percent greater chance of finding employment, with the link strongest for those who traditionally have the hardest time finding work. Per the NEA’s Director of Research and Analysis, “If volunteerism is indeed a pathway to employment, then arts organizations, venues, and activities could be hotbeds for this crucial transition.”
• The chance that a child will earn her way into a higher class than her parents’ varies considerably across major American cities – her odds are better in New York or several California cities than in, say, Ohio. The driving forces seem to be not higher tax credits for the poor or taxes on the rich, but greater geographic integration of the poor and middle class, more stable families, stronger K-12 education, and higher civic engagement.
• Researchers in Ireland have found that listening to music from different cultures may prompt you to “denigrate outsiders” if the music sounds particularly unconventional to you, and conclude that “attempts to celebrate and share diversity may have the reverse effect.” Isn’t that also an argument for exposing children to lots of different kinds of music, all the time?
• Market research by IMPACTS into visitor-serving organizations like zoos, symphonies, and museums suggests that overall satisfaction is driven much more by the “entertainment experience” than the “educational experience” – entertainment is four times as important to visitors. (The linked piece does not define “entertainment,” so it is possible that really fun education may fare better.)
• Any idea how much you’d have to pay the Rolling Stones to cover “Brown Sugar” on your debut album? According to preliminary results from a new set of music-and-copyright quizzes hosted online by the Future of Music Coalition, fewer than a quarter of respondents can tell you – though we don’t know how many of them are aspiring musicians. Or Mick Jagger.

• Welcome Dan Lurie, the NEA’s new Senior Advisor and Director of Strategic Partnerships.
• Nice to see the National Conference of State Legislatures recognizing the value of arts and culture, especially with state arts agencies under such budget pressure this year and state houses having become quite an ideological battleground over the past decade.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT – INTERNATIONAL

• Is this the first example of a political party devoted to intellectual property issues? Germany’s Pirate Party is “built around issues like reforming copyright and patent law, digital privacy and radical government transparency,” and is loosely linked to the Pirate Bay torrent-sharing platform. It also just won 15 seats in Berlin’s regional government, qualifying it for federal funding.

AH, ORCHESTRAS

• Although the Detroit Symphony is back to playing concerts after a six-month strike last year, it is still far from out of the woods financially.
• Trouble in symphony-land: the Colorado Orchestra has seen 20 of its board members resign after a dispute with the musicians’ union. I have to say, up until quite recently I have felt a limited degree of sympathy for the union and its members who are employed by the larger-market orchestras – a feeling informed to a large degree, I suppose, by my experiences as a (nonunion) composer in the previous decade. But this story is pretty ridiculous. The Denver musicians just accepted a 9% pay cut – after accepting a 24% pay cut just two years ago. If I understand the article correctly, their base salaries are now down to $37,310 a year – barely half of what their colleagues in Indianapolis are paid. And two-thirds of the board resigned because the musicians union took a few extra days to think about the cuts instead of swallowing them immediately. There is actually a board member quoted in the article saying that those who resigned were “sick and tired of the musicians’ complaining.” Are you kidding me?

GIVING TO THE ARTS (PRIZES EDITION)

• This year’s MacArthur “Genius” Fellows have been announced.
• The Grand Rapids ArtPrize, which was deemed a great success in its debut last year, has expanded to include music.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The Irvine Foundation has released a new report on California’s arts and culture ecology.
• I sometimes think of the Arts Policy Library and some of the other work I do on this blog as “research journalism.” If you want to see investigative research journalism at its finest, check out this amazing takedown of a Gates Foundation-funded report that, due to five separate spreadsheet errors, overestimated the cost-effectiveness of a deworming treatment by a factor of almost 100. Note that these aren’t methodological issues, but typos and calculation errors. After some initial hiccups, GiveWell (who published the second look) has really grown into its own as an organization at this point, and the ethic of transparency and intellectual honesty that they’ve embraced is really paying off for them. Congrats.

IN THE FIELD

• Another stellar post from Devon Smith, this time looking at arts incubator models across the country and noting gaps with similar models and other sectors, has provoked chatter from Diane Ragsdale and Linda Essig.
• Remember the Chief Executive Program? The 100 CEOs who will be participating have been announced – and it’s quite a stellar group.
• I’ve been seeing a bunch of commentaries out there on what Facebook’s new changes mean for arts organizations. Here are Colleen Dilenschneider and Jeff Scott to get you started.
• Attention arts marketers: people in their 20s send a median of 40 text messages a day – and blacks and Hispanics text twice as much as whites.

ETC.

• Are hotel lobbies the next third place? (Cf.)
• Congratulations to CultureFuture author and occasional Createquity guest poster Guy Yedwab on his 1000th post.
• I totally invented this in my head back when I was a bandleader. Damn you iPad for coming out five years too late!

On to the news:

YOU’RE FIRED

• The orchestra world has been shaken to the core this month. The largest institution yet to face such troubles, the Philadelphia Orchestra, has filed for bankruptcy (the restructuring kind, not the “we’re throwing in the towel” kind). On the one hand, I am sure that the Fabulous Philadelphians’ financial troubles are very real. On the other, it does strike me as curious not only that (as others have noted) an organization with a $140 million endowment would file for bankruptcy, but that the move precedes the announcement of a $160 million fundraising campaign to save the orchestra. Andrew Taylor digs into the bankruptcy filing docs.
• The Syracuse (NY) Symphony Orchestra has filed for Chapter 7 (we’re throwing in the towel) bankruptcy, after canceling the rest of its season a week earlier. Looks like it’s lights out for this one, not to mention the SSO’s 95 musicians and staff.
• Albuquerque’s New Mexico Symphony has filed for Chapter 7 as well. 80 musicians and staffers will lose their jobs.
• On the plus side, the Detroit Symphony musicians are back to work, albeit six months later. The new three-year contract calls for 25% cuts in salaries (to $79,000 base pay, hardly slave wages) and additional funds available for optional community-service work. The orchestra’s size will be reduced from 96 to 85 musicians.
• The artistically successful but financially troubled Intiman Theatre  in Seattle has cancelled the rest of its season due to money problems. Its artistic director, Kate Whoriskey, has now left as well.
• The Baltimore Shakespeare Festival is kaput after 17 years in operation, making it the second major Baltimore arts organization to fold since the start of the Great Recession (after the Baltimore Opera). The article contains this quote that would make Tyler Cowen smile: “‘We started as a non-Equity company, and if we had dropped our contract, it would have cut our costs,’ Toran said. ‘But that’s exactly what we weren’t going to do. You want to pay your actors, just like you pay lawyers and doctors and teachers. Our goal wasn’t survival at any cost.'” So because they wanted to pay the actors so badly, they decided to give them fewer work opportunities?
• The New York City Opera, two years after spending the 2008-09 season inactive and raiding most of its endowment to stay alive, is facing a possible strike and the delay of its season announcement for next year.
• Pittsburgh arts groups are exploring increased collaboration as a survival strategy.
• Meant to write about this a while ago, but Pepsi Refresh has relaunched with a different process and set of rules after complaints of gaming the system last year.

I QUIT

• Ellen Rudolf is stepping down as longtime director of the Surdna Foundation’s Thriving Cultures Program, which she had initiated with the foundation 17 years ago.
• Jeremy Nowak, a noted advocate for the power of the arts in revitalizing communities, will no longer be the President and CEO of The Reinvestment Fund – for good reason: he’s about to become the new head of the William Penn Foundation. (via GIA News)
• Nina Simon, author, blogger, and museum design consultant extraordinaire, is quitting her consulting and speaking business to be the new Executive Director of the Museum of Art & History at McPherson Center in Santa Cruz, CA. Thankfully, she is not quitting her blog.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

• Whoa…a donor’s estate in Bermuda is withdrawing an £82 million donation to Switzerland’s Lucerne Festival for no reason at all, apparently.
• Chad Bauman riffs on the recent cuts to DC’s Arts and Cultural Affairs Commission from a marketer’s perspective.
• Michael Kaiser takes a dim view of the trends in corporate giving to the arts. Here are some numbers from the Foundation Center.
• Americans Gave a Lot Less in the Recession Than Experts Predicted, reads the Chronicle of Philanthropy headline. Among other things, this story is a pretty big black eye for Giving USA, the annual report on individual giving that had estimated that donor activity was holding steady or barely dropping during the same period.
• Meanwhile, foundations gave (slightly) less in 2010 than 2009, despite the fact that their assets increased by 5%.
• Why don’t more foundations publicly explain the rationale behind their gifts?
• It looks like the growth of new 501(c)(3)s has finally slowed (and the numbers will actually drop considerably once the IRS releases the names of the nonprofits whose status it has revoked as a result of nonfiling). Of course, this hasn’t stopped composer Philip Glass from founding a new festival in Carmel Valley, CA.

SHOW ME THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE

• My colleagues at Fractured Atlas have a new publication laying out what the health insurance reform law means for artists.
• A new publication from the Boekman Foundation in Amsterdam: Cultural Policy Update. And check out this fab cultural policy blog salon put together by my friends at Emerging Arts Professionals – San Francisco Bay Area, featuring an admirably diverse range of voices.
• Not surprisingly, the social media cognoscenti are all abuzz about the new report from the Knight Foundation, “Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril, and Potential of Networks.” Beth Kanter is all over it here.
• CEOs for Cities reports on the residential clustering patterns of the “young and the restless” – college educated 25-34-year-olds. Seems cities’ “close-in neighborhoods” are more important than ever.
• Partners for Livable Communities reports on strategies for arts organization outreach to senior and immigrant audiences.
• Shannon Litzenberger is back with a massive report on cultural policy in the Windy City.
• Won’t you help Devon with her epic Facebook experiment? (It begins tomorrow.)

SEE YOU IN COURT

• David Byrne has come to a settlement with former Florida Governor Charlie Crist, who had used the Talking Heads song “Road to Nowhere” without permission during Crist’s unsuccessful campaign for Senate last year. (Seems a rather auspicious choice, no?) The settlement terms apparently included Charlie recording this apology video, which actually almost makes me feel sorry for him.
• Matthew Guerrieri reports on a dispute between the Music Publishers Association (UK) and the International Music Score Library Project.

BEAUTY CONTESTS

• Bubble sort as demonstrated by Hungarian folk dance.
• Eric Whitacre is back with the Virtual Choir 2.0, this time performing his “Sleep” and featuring over 2000 performers. Sounds great, but fair warning: the video is even cheesier than in the last one.
• To draw in new audiences, an orchestra plays for cows.
• I find a lot of public art less than inspiring, but I have to admit, this is pretty awesome:
  

  After more than a decade of disagreement, Berliners have settled on a monument to celebrate German reunification and the 1989 peaceful revolution: a giant, rocking dish.

  The 55-metre, 330-tonne glittering steel wing can hold up to 1,400 people at any one time, but it needs at least 20 people to get it moving.

  The monument to unity is called Citizens in Motion, and is apparently all about people coming together. If you want to make it move, you have to get a group together and all go in a particular direction.

The panel got off to a lively start, dividing along predictable pro-control/anti-control lines with Gigi Sohn representing the copyright reform viewpoint and Cunard carrying the banner for law and order.

Both Sohn and Batteau pointed out the advantage to artists of removing the gatekeepers and marketing to fans directly, with Sohn citing Radiohead’s In Rainbows as an example. Sarmiento asked about the tendency among artists and arts organizations to work without a contract. Both Cunard and Sohn (who has a legal background herself) said that they understood the motivations behind this tendency, but nevertheless urged caution and documentation whenever possible. A famous case along these lines was the controversy between Martha Graham and her company that erupted after the famous choreographer passed away.

Sarmiento next brought up an instance of a museum publishing actual Pollack images in its catalog for an exhibition of Pollack fakes, against the wishes of the Pollack estate. The consensus on the panel seemed to be that this was a pretty audacious invocation of fair use and might not hold up in the legal process. Batteau countered with the reality that companies will generally not spend a lot of money suing people who don’t have any money. There are two famous cases, both involving the artist Jeff Koons, that have served as benchmarks for establishing fair use. The key issue tends to be the extent to which an artistic work is transformative of any underlying work.

At this point the conversation turned to rap music and samples, and by extension, peer-to-peer file sharing. Sohn mentioned that Warner Music has just hired Jim Griffin, who has been advocating for a while for a system in which consumers would pay ISPs an extra fee every month to download all of the music they want, which apparently the RIAA has to this point been resisting. (Similar measures have been adopted or proposed in France and Canada). Cunard claimed that copyright bodies treat all works of art similarly except for music, because music ownership is so complicated. (More complicated than film? That would be surprising.) Sarmiento next asked about legal ramifications associated with blogging. The Electronic Frontier Foundation apparently publishes a legal guide for blogging, which should be helpful.

An audience member asked about orphan works, which are works that are still under copyright but whose owner is deceased or out of business. Using the work in such a situation involves a risk management calculus that recognizes that, should the copyright owner unexpectedly come out of the woodwork, the owner could sue for statutory damages (i.e., punitive fines that can reach up to $150,000 per count for willful infringement) or seek an injunction against the display or performance of the work. There is a bill coming before Congress that would tweak the copyright code to limit damages from such a situation to reasonable compensation arising from the use of the work. The bill might also contain some measures to establish some form of a small-claims copyright court, for relatively obscure artists who nevertheless want to protect their rights.

Another question from the audience asked how artists can best be educated about their own rights, and specifically about preventing theft via the internet. Batteau claimed that this theft actually doesn’t happen that much, because the only real way to make money off of an obscure artist’s work is through advertising, but advertisers are very scrupulous about getting rights because of fear of litigation. In fact, this kind of theft can actually be somewhat beneficial to an artist’s career through an exposure perspective. (I am assuming they’re not including plagiarism in this definition of theft.) Sohn commented that artists need to start thinking differently about how they are compensated, and advocated the virtual tip jar model as a more market-oriented solution.

In response to another question about the theater and dance worlds, Cunard said that directors are increasingly asserting copyright privileges in certain works. This brought the conversation back to the question of written contracts defining roles for the creators involved. Sohn wrapped up the panel by talking about how many more items than you may think are copyrighted, including furniture, textiles, wallpaper, and there is even a movement now to copyright fashion design. However, panelists pointed out that a lawsuit is not necessarily the end of the story–in the case of overreaching by the suing party, the internet can be a great tool to rally public opinion against the action and convince the plaintiff to reconsider.

That’s it for the Arts & Culture Conference! Hope you enjoyed the real-time account. If you think this is a format I should consider in the future, do say so in the comments.