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Case Summary
Kelley v. Chicago Park District
Kelley v. Chicago Park Dist., No. 1:04-cv-07715 (N.D.Ill. 2008), aff’d in part and rev’d in part, Nos. 08-3701 & 08-3712 (7th Cir. 2011).
Précis
In a case testing the limits of the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (“VARA”), the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held that an artist’s
moral rights
The right of an author or artist, based on natural-law principles, to guarantee the integrity of a creation despite any copyright or property-law right of its owner. Moral rights include rights of (a) attribution (also termed “paternity”), the right to be given credit and to claim credit for a work, and to deny credit if the work is changed, (b) integrity, the right to ensure that the work is not changed without the artist's consent, (c) publication, the right not to reveal a work before its creator is satisfied with it, and (d) retraction, the right to renounce a work and withdraw it from sale or display (Black’s Law Dictionary (8th ed. 2004)).
moral rights had not been violated when a municipality reconfigured his site-specific wildflower garden, which had been installed in a city park. The Seventh Circuit rejected the VARA claim, finding that as a “living garden,” the work lacked sufficient authorship and fixation to be copyrightable – a threshold requirement for works claiming VARA protection.
Associated Legal Decision(s)
Associated Statutes and/or Legislation
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