Dance Music Business Resource

Sports is not art : Specimen 0843 (SportsTrax)

Saturday, April 26, 2008 / 8 pm
Specimen 0843 (SportsTrax)

In 1997, the Motorola and Stats Corporations made a pager-type device called SportsTrax, which displayed score updates of US live sports games. A conflict arose when the NBA claimed that Motorola and Stats were not entitled to use the score data. During the court case NBA v. Motorola and STATS, Inc., the judges stated that “professional basketball games are not original works of authorship protected by copyright.” Sports games are considered accumulations of facts (nature) and are not afforded copyright protection unless they are fixed in a tangible medium of expression (culture). Under the title Specimen 0843, Agency brings together an assembly of performers, legal scholars, athletes, and economists to explore questions of copyright, originality, and authorship, and shows what sports can tell us about art. Kobe Matthys is artist and founder of Agency. He conducts longterm research on the practice of reappropriation and the public domain. Agency, founded in 1992, has for several years been preoccupied with “quasi-things”—things that have uncertain status and sit at the bifurcation of “nature” and “culture.”

Mime Centrum Berlin, Schönhauser Allee 73, 10437 Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, U2, S8/S85/S41/S42 Schönhauser Allee

Admission 3,- €

Some advanced software based compositions completely do away with the concept of authorship and wander in to the area of data mapping. As artists we know how irrelevant this old style copyright law is. But I think we should not forget that copyright law is also a wonderful achievement for artists : it gives us the protection over our creations that is already granted (by common sense and convention) to physical objects. I'm not of the opinion that we should pirate everything, sneer at the RIAA (although they are worth sneering at) and go running off into a "data wants to be free" future.

Energy would be better spent devising a clever new income stream.