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phenomenally limited circumscription aroundwhat the professor is allowed to do. And thatis mainly a way to force upon the professor therisk of fair use. Most professors don’t actuallyabide by that policy, because it gets in our wayof dealing with our students. What it means is ifI’m ever sued, NYU won’t lift a finger.” 131Ursula Endlicher uses the Internet for allaspects of her work, both gallery installations andonline art. One recent project dealt with spam:“I pulled in a lot of text and names [from spamemails] – all the information I’d gathered overthe years – and I displayed it in an interactivepiece. As you enter a room, you have what I callan identity ticker – it assigns the names of peoplewho have sent me spam. Who are they? They’reprobably not people; they’re probably computergeneratedprograms. I use the text that was inthe body of the email. It gets randomly triggeredby a user who comes in.” She did not questionthe legality of the project, because, she says, ofthe “weirdness” of spam.Heather Wagner created a project usingInternet icons and images. “For a while, I wasgrabbing the little icons that are on Googlenews every day. Under each heading there’sa different icon – U.S. news, sports news,international. So every day I was grabbing themand making a little collage of what was the topnews. It didn’t occur to me that if I ever printedit or showed it someplace, I would need to getanyone’s permission. It’s just stuff that’s out there– a picture of Bush, or the Pope or something.Whereas if it were by a person who created theimage with some artistic intention, I wouldn’tthink I could just grab it.”In an installation piece, Wagner used the textof the Samuel Beckett monologue, Not I. Shethought about seeking permission, but was toldthat the Beckett estate is “notoriously bad. Don’teven try.” The estate requires scrupulous adherenceto Beckett’s stage directions, even down to“the measurements of how far upstage the actorscan be.” In Wagner’s version, there were noactors at all: “I had a computer voice read theplay, and then had it trigger visual things.” AlthoughWagner thought her appropriation wasprobably illegal, there is certainly an argumentthat the fair-use factors would favor her transformativeuse of this iconic 20th century text.Erika Block has had experience in theater,and describes her knowledge of fair use as “sortof old school – how many minutes of music canyou use without getting rights?” She said thatshe has “freely used music, sounds, and verses inproduction,” adding: “I’m religious about givingattribution; and I figure that working for a littlenonprofit, where 3,000 people are going to seethe show, is really different from a commercialproject with larger audiences.”She has also used samples in digital artwork.A current project called “Dirty Little Stories”is a digital montage, adapted from a theaterpiece, using clips of dialog from classic filmnoir. “For the theater production, we basicallyrented VCR tapes and created digital recordings.I integrated the clips with original photos intoan interactive montage.” She is aware of thecopyright implications, but doesn’t know theanswers. “Some of them are really quick clips;some of them are longer. Is it two minutes formusic fair use? There’s some number. I can’t evenremember it. Do you know the answer? I haveto decide if it’s worth using that material beforeI go further with distributing this work. I thinkI would probably use it and give attribution.”James Robinson’ recent project, “TheQuotomatic,” calls upon a digital archiveof quotations using a supermarket bar codescanner. “Instead of quoting a price for anobject, it gives you a quotation. It recognizeswhat the object is, like a can of corn, and thenit’ll search Bartleby.com, which is an onlinearchive of 80,000 quotations. It looks for aquote that is relevant to a can of corn. Thenprints it out on a mailing label.“I’m sure a lot of the work in the archive iscopyrighted, but I’m not concerned with that.I’m not even really concerned with fair use.That’s changed a bit since I came to ITP, whereI had artistic license. Having worked in thepublishing world, I’ve come to the conclusionthat copyright is a political tool. Once you getinto the legal game, it’s over.”Robinson elaborated by describing hisinvolvement with BaseballLibrary.com, anonline archive of baseball history. “We had afeature that we were doing for CBS Sports Linecalled ‘Believe It or Else.’ We received a ceaseand desist letter from the ‘Ripley’s Believe ItBrennan Center for Justice 27