Tattoos, Architecture, and Copyright

In my IP seminar, I ask students to pick an article to present in class for a critical style and substance review. This year, one of my students picked an article about copyright and tattoos, a very live issue. The article was decent enough, raising many concerns about tattoos: Is human skin fixed? Is it a copy? How do you deposit it at the Library of Congress? (answer: photographs) What rights are there to modify it? To photograph it? Why is it ok for photographers to take pictures, but not ok for video game companies to emulate them? Can they be removed or modified under VARA (which protects against such things for visual art)?

It occurred to me that we ask many of these same questions with architecture, and that the architectural rules have solved the problem. You can take pictures of buildings. You can modify and destroy buildings. You register buildings by depositing plans and photographs. Standard features are not protectible (sorry, no teardrop, RIP, and Mom tattoo protection). But you can't copy building designs. If we view tattoos on the body as a design incorporated into a physical structure (the human body), it all makes sense, and solves many of our definitional and protection problems.

Clever, right? I was going to write and article about it, maybe. Except then I discovered that somebody else had. In That Old Familiar Sting: Tattoos, Publicity and Copyright, Matthew Parker writes:

Tattoos have experienced a significant rise in popularity over the last several decades, and in particular an explosion in popularity in the 2000s and 2010s. Despite this rising popularity and acceptance, the actual mechanics of tattoo ownership and copyright remain very much an issue of first impression before the courts. A series of high-priced lawsuits involving famous athletes and celebrities have come close to the Supreme Court at times, but were ultimately settled before any precedent could be set. This article describes a history of tattoos and how they might be seen to fit in to existing copyright law, and then proposes a scheme by which tattoo copyrights would be bifurcated similar to architecture under the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act.

It's a whole article, so Parker spends more time developing the theory and dealing with topics such as joint ownership than I do in my glib  recap. For those interested in this topic, it's certainly a thought-provoking analogy worth considering.