intellectual property on holiday

Imagine being an Intellectual Property lawyer on holiday. Especially if you like fairgrounds. You'd never be able to switch off. Everywhere you turned would be somebody else (probably, presumably) infringing the copyright of someone you represent.

It must be especially tough if you work for Disney.

It's a shame, the way a generation of fairground owners have just festooned their rides with knocked-off cartoon imagery. It can be visually striking and the badness of the knock-offs is sometimes funny.

But there's something really original and thrilling about some of the original fairground graphics. This sort of stuff. But I suspect we won't see much of this preserved in real world commercial fairgrounds. It's not exciting enough for the kids. It doesn't work when the rides are all called things like Neutron and Terminator.

You get the sense though that change might be in the air, and that a number of artists who learned their trade doing graffiti are finding their way into fairground art, creating a new graphic language for a new generation of rides. That'll be an exciting combination.

There are some great round-ups of British fairground art here and here.

Comments

[neil]

There's an uncanny resemblance between the familiar and yet strange representations of Fred Flintstone and Mickey on those fairground rides and the pictures of us on that 'Napoleons' invite. Do you think there's any chance they could be by the same artist?

[Stefan G. Bucher]

Fairground graphics like the ones shown here used to upset me to the point of ranting when I was a kid. They were clearly in violation of copyright and, more importantly, they were such bad, bad knockoffs of characters I loved. Pissed me off to no end. Still kind of does, even though I understand that I should like them for hipster irony purposes.

But I like beautiful artwork (and beautiful language) that shows care. It's kept me from appreciating most of the "adult swim" lineup on the Cartoon Network. It also means that I love, love, love original fairground designs with all the beautifully carved gold swirls, or even the patterns of rows and rows of colorful light bulbs. (I never got laid in high school. No fucking wonder.)