Does copyright of art works only apply to the ones in frames to be hung on walls or to carved objects standing in public and private places? To what extent is the ownership of art works which are multimedia happenings protected? 

The law is necessarily behind the pace of change in the cultural scene. In a discussion about law, art and technology on Lawrence Lessing, various aspects of this theme are raised.

Following on from the themes "Is programming art?" and attempts to create a fusion of digital media and artistic practice, the acceptance of a new branch of art demands definition of who actually owns the rights to use the works and to what extent copying them can be seen as a breach of the rights of a creative digital artist. How can existing copyright images and sounds be used? Does decontextualisation create a new entity? What is the meaning of 20% of a multimedia creative event?

When artists write code, their code may be protected by law, or may be open-sourced under Creative Commons. However, the value of the artistic creativity, the results of disciplined learning, may not be recognised if it does not take a conventional form. The synthesis of art and code hacking is not yet unambiguously defined in this regard.

When a photographer takes a photo of something, that thing may have some rights if it is a famous person, an artwork, or a public icon. Otherwise the rights belong to the photographer. If that photo is the reproduced as an animation, broken up into part images and combined with other media in a different spatial context, it is a different work. It is a creative product of a different artist. Or is it?