Tezos

The Many Faces of Notzilla

Creator

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Description

This piece is a commentary on intellectual property and copyright infringement. Toho Co. Ltd is well known for going after Hollywood studios, automakers, toy manufacturers, rock bands, book publishers, national food chains, record labels, bloggers, wineries and just about anybody using the name Godzilla or any physical resemblance. This aggressive war on IP is interesting, especially considering that the creators of the monster died in the 90s. Furthermore, when they created him in 1954, they were highly inspired by King-Kong. The use of IP in art is a completely different story. You can find a ton of examples where it’s fair use like the Campbell’s Soup Can prints from Andy Wharold, KAWS’s SpongeBob SquarePants with Xs on his eyes and the OG of appropriation art Marcel Duchamp who is mostly famous for painting a mustache on top of the Mona Lisa with the letters LHOOQ. Phonetically in French it means "elle a chaud au cul", which loosely translates to “Her ass is on fire” or “She’s truly horny.” With this cryptic message, Duchamp finally revealed to everyone the secret behind her iconic smile. In each of these cases, the artist can claim parody, satire, or he can claim that the piece is meant as commentary and criticism. As long as the piece is transformative enough and there’s no chance that anyone would confuse it with the original, it’s perfectly legal, but your intent needs to be clear. Koons once tried to claim parody after copying a photo by Art Rogers as a sculpture, but the similarity was so close that the average lay person would recognize the copying and so the sculpture was found to be a copy of the work by Rogers. Koons was not commenting on Rogers' work specifically, and so his copying of that work did not fall under the fair use exception. Lastly, there was also a case in the NFT world where an artist by the name of Shilly Preston had his OBJKT account suspended for naming one of his artist mashup creations “Royal Fidenza.” In this particular piece, he mixed the piece “Royalty” by Xer0x while taking inspiration from Tyler Hobb’s style. Turns out Tyler had registered a trademark on the word “Fidenza” at the USPTO so he and his team decided to enforce it and block Shilly Preston. This dispute has since been resolved and Shilly Preston’s OBJKT account is now up and running, but this was quite an aggressive response, especially coming from someone that is such a big part of this NFT community. Tyler goes into details about why he’s doing those things on his website in the “ARTIST OWNERSHIP OF WORKS” section and I invite you to read it if you want to know more about his view on the matter. "Then you have a responsibility no man has ever faced. You have your fear, which might become reality, and you have Godzilla, which is reality." — Hideo Ogata, Godzilla, 1954 Commissioned by @Xer0x_NFT for the #notgodzilla event