Ownership: a word with fluid definitions. On the one hand you have both a public and private sector push to extend the realm of ownership to areas not thought possible. Pharmaceutical and biotechnological multinationals are scrambling to the courts to secure patents on human and naturally occurring genes. Yup, that genetic predisposition you have that makes your second toe longer than your big toe – it's not yours, it's Eli Lily's or Pfizer's or whoever it is that spends as much to keep their names from the public consciousness as it does to own that gene. (like Philip Morris, uh, I mean Altria) Likewise, major record companies, unsatisfied with their horribly exploitative contracts with lucrative pop acts have painted the Mp3 trade as undermining the integrity of these artists. And now the labels and artists have gone to the FCC to bust that 10 year old suburban kid who downloads a Dr. Dre or Metallica tune for the “thief” he really is.

On the other hand, there is the whole postmodern, artistic and philosophic breakdown of the whole idea of ownership. If originality in its purest form is dead, then any new expression is only a contextual reflection of an artist's environment; a juxtaposition of external influences where creativity is articulated through the selection and grouping of appropriated elements. Think: King Tubby's dub reggae specials, Jazzy Jeff's hip hop sampling, Picasso's collages, Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbão, Warhol, Basquiat, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg. All of those people heavily utilize external source material in synthesizing their work. As a result of this whole philosophic direction you have freeware/shareware, open source, Unix/Linux and royalty free music, photography and art – in short, source material for you. What this has done is shift the emphasis from ownership to distribution. By breaking down the old systems of ownership and royalties that forced artists to use official channels to distribute their work – free distribution (most notably through the internet) has provided an unparalleled opportunity to aspiring artists to get their work out there, build a name and use that as a spring board to then make a living through their work.

What this all brings me to is a very interesting case example of the fluidity of ownership right here in Toronto. Here's the story in brief: local graffiti artist Tokyo paints an illegal piece on a wall. At some point someone working for an advertising company saw the piece, liked it, and photographed it. That photo then quickly found its way into a huge campaign for Fuji Film on billboards throughout the city. A number of things in this story are noteworthy both favorably and unfavorably for the artist. Firstly, Tokyo's permission wasn't requested or granted to use his work to push Fuji's products. As such, his ownership of the piece was violated for the gain of a multinational corporation. However, not only was that piece painted illegally, the whole nature of graffiti dictates that once a piece is completed in the public realm, that piece becomes public property – people will write over it; people will take pictures of it. While the artist's name is still the centerpiece of the work, by painting in the public realm, the artist has forfeited their ownership of the work. However, that issue becomes sticky when the image is appropriated to sell something. Now, as a piece of commercial work, the artist is entitled to compensation. And as is typical in these David and Goliath struggles, Fuji has flexed its corporate muscle and has Tokyo so scared that he's refused repeated requests to tell his story in the public realm. You've got to feel sorry for the poor guy.

The real irony in this story lies in a hypothetical situation. If Tokyo were to turn around and sell that same image to another company for another reason, Fuji may decide to exercise their right to sue him over copyright violations. So in the simple act of taking a picture of a graffiti mural, the ownership of that work has somehow been transferred from the artist to the company using that photo. Talk about fluidity of ownership…