With increasingly pervasive art fraud, today’s artists and art aficionados need all the help they can get. “Intellectual Property Rights: A Guide for Artists and Designers” and The Authentic Project are two new resources they can turn to.

An up-to-date and comprehensive guide to managing intellectual property (IP) rights in visual art and design can save you time and money.

At last, the complexities of IP law with regards to art and design have been unraveled – and in plain English yet! Intellectual Property Rights: A Guide for Artists and Designers is co-authored by well-known art and design lawyer Henry Lydiate, and lawyers and creative practitioners Rob Grose and Lubna Azhar. It is a practical guide for those who would like to learn and practice managing intellectual property rights in this area and explains key concerns and legal issues relevant to the protection and exploitation of creative work. 

The book, written primarily from the perspective of the law in England and Wales (with additional information on Scottish law and international variations where appropriate), uses specific examples and images to illustrate and demystify fundamental legal concepts. Detailed references to legal statutes and precedents supplement the text. Needless to say, the book is structured to make an easily confusing subject readable to the average person unfamiliar with intellectual property laws.

This IP guide covers both hard and digital media, including: copyright, moral rights, commissioning, confidentiality and contractual arrangements…the commercial exploitation of three-dimensional works and the use of design rights…and laws relating to trade marks, patents and passing off. The authors also clarify the distinction between unregistered rights (those that come into existence automatically upon the creation of a work) and registered rights (those that require an investment of time and money, and a formal application). They take readers through the registration and application processes and the logic behind them.

If you want to spot trouble before it goes too far, as well as identify creative opportunities, Intellectual Property Rights: A Guide for Artists and Designers will save you time, money and headaches. Aimed primarily at creative practitioners, designers and their clients, design and brand managers, the book is also a good resource for legal practitioners who want an introduction to or a refresher on the subject. Picture researchers and libraries, students and directors of higher education courses in visual communication, design and art, and related professional practice studies will also benefit greatly from this volume.

Is That Van Gogh Really a Van Gogh: The Authentic Project Can Tell

Digital technology is lending its hand to the art world's age old question: Is it real or fake? Dr. Eric Postma, a researcher in the Netherlands who has spent over three years developing his self-titled "Authentic Project," may have the answer.

Though spotting a forged painting usually takes an expert eye and hours of analysis, a computer program that analyses artwork for signs of an artist's unique style can now do it for you. The software, called Authentic, can also help date paintings by a particular artist.

The Authentic software program is based on the workings of the human brain. Through analyzing and digitizing high-resolution transparencies from x-rayed canvases, the software learns to recognize a painter's style, individual brushstrokes and technique, thus reducing the time it can take to distinguish a masterpiece from a fake.

According to Igor Berezhnoy at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who developed the system with colleagues Postma and Jaap van den Herik, "We're trying to have a replica of an art expert that helps them to do the dirty work and supplements what they are doing."

The team used the software to analyse the use of colours, brush strokes and canvas types in more than 180 Van Gogh paintings. By dividing 145 digitised paintings into pixels and analysing the colours of each and how they compared with nearby pixels, the software was able to identify patterns unique to the painter. Berezhnoy further explains, "We analyze those characteristics of brushstrokes like the curvature and all kinds of statistics, the position of the brushstroke on the painting, the thickness of the brushstroke, the separation of the brushstroke, the repetition of the brushstrokes… and based on those statistics we can say that this brushwork is different from the fake brush work."

But while the 'Authentic Project' is a useful tool, Dr. Chris Stolwicjk, the head of research at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, says that the software will not replace human art experts.  Nevertheless, it will be a great help. He stated, "Image processing can be a tool in art expertise, because the computer can help us in a very quick and very precise way to determine several characteristics of the painter's hand in works of art."

Like a human brain, the 'Authentic Project' software learns from each painting it analyzes, expanding its knowledge of artists' unique characteristics and contributing to its performance in the future.