Art Law - Contracts, Commissions, Intellectual Property Protections and More!

Free & open to the public! Please RSVP using the button above. Spaces limited.

Due to our buildings acoustics, there will not be a Zoom option for this lecture.

Thursday, January 25th / 5:30-6:30PM

ABOUT THIS WORKSHOP:

Mr. Butch Bracknell is a local Norfolk attorney and is offering this FREE lecture at the d'Art Center on Art Law. The topics that will be covered are below:

1. Sales Contracts - commissions, art purchase agreements, licenses, stolen art, etc.
2. Copyright - fair use and moral rights of artists
3. First Amendment - free expression and obscenity laws
4. Government Funding
5. Taxation
6. Cultural Property - cultural protections, antiquities, cultural heritage

Takeaways from this lecture:

• Artists should consider forming their own company for art business. LLC or non-stock corporation, EIN, DUNS number, get required permits (business license in Norfolk, for example), business bank account, decide on how to pay yourself, business insurance (maybe).
• Copyright matters. In fact, legally, it’s what defines art as art.
• Written contacts in all cases. The whole point is to avoid disputes. Get specific.
• Get representation in advance for big jobs (commissions, etc.)
• When shipping art or delivering art, be mindful of when risk of loss passes.

ABOUT BUTCH:

Butch Bracknell is an attorney with the Norfolk, Virginia law firm of Crenshaw, Ware & Martin, PLC, and an attorney-consultant with Lexpat Global Services LLC. Until December 2022, he was an assistant legal advisor at NATO’s HQ SACT in Norfolk where he practiced international, business, ethics and compliance, institutional governance, and innovation law. A graduate of Harvard Law School (LLM 2006), the University of Maryland (JD with Honors 1999) and the University of North Carolina (BA 1992) and a current Masters degree candidate at the University of Oxford, he is a retired Marine lieutenant colonel (OF-4). His military duty began as an armor officer with 2nd Tank Battalion, 2nd Marine Division. After law school he served in California, Germany, Virginia, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Washington DC (The Atlantic Council of the United States), North Carolina, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. His private work centers on procurement, export control, ethics and compliance, data protection and privacy, cybersecurity and employment law.

Butch’s public interest work has focused on:

• mitigating the effects of armed conflict on noncombatants,
• accountability for military standards violators,
• the development of international law norms in future conflict, including emerging technologies such as AI, unmanned systems, space, cyber, and hypersonic weapons,
• and emerging concepts including urban warfare and the impacts of sea level rise and climate change on the future of conflict.

Butch is a fellow with the Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Affairs and the Royal Society for the Arts and is a member of the Truman National Security Project’s Defense Council. His publications can be found at https://butchbracknell.weebly.com and you can link with him at https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbutchbracknell and on Twitter @ButchBracknell.