ABOVE: Details from photobooth self-portraits done by Andy Warhol, and recently made public for the first time by the Warhol Foundation. But are we allowed to show it to you?

Digital law and copyright professor Lawrence Lessig wrote recently in Wired magazine about the policy of the Warhol Foundation when it comes to granting artists and scholars the use of Warhol imagery for their work. Most in their situation, sitting on a mountain of iconic 20th century imagery, most of it highly bankable, are very grabby with their “intellectual property” (as it’s known). But Lessig, who is the founder of Creative Commons and an out-front leader in advocating for less stringent copyright schemes, writes that the Foundation lets artists and scholars use Warhol imagery not only for free, but also free of restriction on how it’s used.

Warhol, after all, made his most famous works by appropriating other people’s images—soup cans, Brill-o boxes, celebrity photos—and so the foundation felt (or so explains foundation president Joel Wachs) that it had a mandate to allow other artists to appropriate Warhol in turn. Not a profound or life-altering decision, certainly, but it does acknowledge the essential truth that artists do not operate in a vacuum, and every idea came from somewhere.

LINK: Wired News > When Theft Serves Art