Rub on State-Enacted Resale Rights

Chuck Close, Self Portrait, 2000, in the Smithsonian Collection. Close unsuccesfully brought a lawsuit to collect royalyy payments under the California Resale Rights Act, but the law was held to be pre-empted by federal law by the Ninth Circuit in 2018.

Guy Rub (Ohio State University, Michael E. Moritz College of Law) has posted an article from a symposium issue of the Kentucky Law Journal on: Experimenting with State-Enacted Resale Rights.

Current federal law does not require sellers of fine art to pay a share of the sale price to the artists, although Congress and federal agencies have been debating the advantages and disadvantages of such a duty, commonly referred to as Artists’ Resale Rights (ARR), since the 1970s. What is often missing from this discourse is the role that state law might play in this ecosystem. This issue, and especially California’s 1976 ARR law, the only state-enacted ARR to date, is the focus of this Article. 

States are often said to be the laboratories of democracy as they can experiment with various legal rules and produce rich comparative empirical data. The Article explores whether states can be the laboratories of ARR as well. It reaches three conclusions: First, there is a vibrant debate concerning the impacts and overall desirability of resale royalties, but that debate is driven by relatively scarce empirical data. Second, if states decide to adopt ARR they can provide some of that missing information. Third, subject to minor restrictions, states are allowed to enact ARR legislation, and the recent Ninth Circuit decisions that held the California ARR act unconstitutional are, for the most part, misguided, as it does not fully recognize the important role that states play in the markets for creative goods.

Rub, Guy A., Experimenting With State-Enacted Resale Rights (June 20, 2019). 109 Kent. L. J. 647 (2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3413846

Ninth Circuit to hear Artist’s Resale Rights Appeal

In 2001 a number of artists including Chuck Close, Laddie John Dill, and the estates of Robert Graham and Sam Francis brought suit against auction houses and eBay to receive royalties they had been owed under California’s Resale Royalty Act. That Moral Rights legislation provided that visual artists should receive 5% of the resale price when their work was resold by a California resident, or resold in the state of California for more than $1,000. The District Court struck down the law as unconstitutional on the grounds that commerce like this must be regulated at the federal level under the Commerce Clause to the Constitution. Continue reading “Ninth Circuit to hear Artist’s Resale Rights Appeal”