Angelos Floros

Presented: Ionian University Library, Corfu, May 8, 2023, link

The talk opens with a conversation. Not a search, and not a citation: an exchange with ChatGPT about authenticity and about rights — what makes a work original, who owns it once it exists, and what survives when it is copied. 

The machine answers well. It sets out the two halves of copyright, lists what the law protects — audiovisual works, sound recordings and musical compositions, written works, images, video games and software, theatre and musicals — and does it without hesitation or error.

What follows is everything the list cannot hold.

The law. Greek Law 2121/1993 states that creators acquire, by the act of creation itself, two distinct rights: the economic right to exploit the work, and the moral right protecting their personal bond with it. The first can be sold. The second cannot. And behind the statute sits an older principle, from Brandeis:

"The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions — knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas — become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use."

Asking for permission. Then the talk descends from principle to practice, through three cases the speaker went through himself: Chronis Aidonidis and EMI; To Roloi by Manos Hadjidakis and Konstantinos Vita, with Sirios Editions; and Stravinsky, with Philips. Three works, three companies, three different answers — and the discovery that what the law grants in a sentence takes months to obtain in fact.

Reproduction. John Berger, Ways of Seeing: what happens to an image once it can be copied. The reproduction does not merely distribute the work; it changes what the work is.

Authenticity. Berger again — and then the case that dissolves it. The Athos Digital Ark, made with Cosmote, digitises the monastic heritage of Mount Athos. What is the authentic object when the object exists in a form that can be perfectly copied, and when the original is in a place most people will never be permitted to enter?

Against that stands the counter-movement: © and ®, the machinery by which authenticity is claimed and defended.

The authentic replica. The talk closes with the Eames Office and the Lounge Chair — a design of 1956 still manufactured under licence by Vitra, Herman Miller and HAY. Here authenticity is neither in the object nor in the maker's hand. It is in the licence: an authentic replica is a copy with permission, and everything else is a fake, however identical.

Which returns the question to where it started. The machine answered correctly and understood nothing — because copyright in the arts is not a list of protected categories. It is a negotiation about what counts as the real thing.