The East Side Gallery is one of Berlin’s most popular tourist attractions, a 1.3km long brightly painted stretch of the wall which divided east and west for almost 30 years.
However, now the outdoor exhibition space is embroiled in an expensive copyright controversy after Berlin council destroyed some artworks painted on the wall and reproduced others without the permission of the original artists.
The city of Berlin, which owns the wall and the land around it, is being sued by 21 artists over the way the council handled recent renovation of the gallery.
In papers due to be filed at a Berlin court this week, the artists say they — and about 80 other painters who decorated the wall shortly after the borders between east and west were opened in November 1989 — were offered 3,000 euros (US$4,460) each by Berlin council to recreate their original murals after the site was overhauled for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall two years ago.
The artists were told if they refused to comply, an urban renewal firm contracted by the council would whitewash their work and get someone else to recreate — or “forge,” according to the aggrieved artists — the originals.
It is not unlike a London borough destroying a piece of Banksy graffiti and then getting it recreated in order to keep the tourists coming.
Many of the Berlin artists deemed 3,000 euros an insultingly low amount, especially as it was public knowledge that Berlin council had put aside a total of 2.2 million euros for the renovations.
Hannes Hartung, a lawer based in Munich representing artists in the legal action, said Thierry Noir, one of the artists who contributed to the East Side Gallery, had successfully won 250,000 euros from Germany’s highest court after a section of the wall he painted was sold to a private collector.
Bodo Sperling, one of the founders of the East Side Gallery, whose work was whitewashed two years ago, is demanding at least 25,000 euros.
Sperling and 18 others who refused the 3,000 euros and then watched their work being destroyed are suing the council. They said they would be happy to repaint their designs — for a fair price. Ever since they threatened legal action during the renovation process two years ago, their sections of the wall have remained blank.
Two other artists have launched a claim for intellectual property theft after their original paintings were recreated by the council when they turned down the city’s offer. Carmen Leidner Heidrich’s Niemandsland (No Man’s Land) and Die Geburt der Kachinas (The Birth of Kachina) by Hans Jurgen Grosse were both “forged” against their creators’ will.
The original East Side Gallery was created just after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 as a project to bring creative minds from both sides of the divide together. More than 100 artists from east and west contributed work, forgoing any fees in the spirit of peace.
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS