Lewis Baltz

Question 10: I'd like to know what you think about the problems linked to copyright and digital manipulation in general of a piece of art.

Answer: I think it's an amazing period for that. I think probably if you had a child and you wanted to advise him on a profession to enter, I'd say be a copyright lawyer in the digital age because this is something that all of the attorney's all over the world are going to benefit from tremendously. So on the one hand you have organisations -think of Disney, Microsoft - that are trying to gain exclusive rights and copyrights to everything on earth and ownership of imagery in a way has never existed before. And yet at the same time there's the possibility technically of truly duplicating, cloning imagery greater than ever existed before. So I think the most engaging legal struggle of the next twenty or thirty years will be to just to see where these rights of property begin and end. I assume that once something goes on the Internet, once something is released as a CD-ROM, it belongs to everybody.