Does Bansky own his artwork?
The disappearance of some of his works reopens the debate on the copyright of street artists.
A British graffiti artist, whose identity is unknown, painted a howling wolf on the support this past week and claimed authorship shortly afterwards on his social media, prompting a mass of people to come and photograph it and the takers to get a ladder to climb up to the roof and do their work. If they had waited until nightfall, someone else would have been ahead of them. The question is ... why doesn't anyone report it? Could Banksy himself do it?
‘It is debatable because we would be facing a possible collision: the moral right to respect the integrity of the work and the property right of the support on which he has painted, which belongs to a third party who, in all likelihood, has not obtained authorisation to use it as a canvas. Beyond that, we would have to see whether Banksy would be interested in entering into legal battles because his identity would be revealed’, analyses Javier Vázquez, intellectual and industrial property partner at RocaJunyent.
Can the owner of a building or object erase the work? ‘There is an infringement of copyright for painting over it but, in my opinion, this would not go very far because, in the end, it is your property’, says Javier Vázquez. If, for example, the owner of the bar where the graffiti artist has drawn pelicans eating fish wanted to erase them or change the sign, he could. It is another thing if he wants to do so, since it is a good advertisement. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to cover it with glass, as has happened with previous works.
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