The laws governing "intellectual property" have grown so expansive in recent years that artists need legal experts to sort them all out. Borrowing from another artwork--as jazz musicians did in the 1930s and Looney Tunes illustrators did in 1940s--will now land you in court. If the current copyright laws had been in effect back in the day, whole genres such as collage, hiphop, and Pop Art might have never have existed.

The irony here couldn't be more stark. Rooted in the U.S. Constitution, copyright was originally intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas but is now being used to stifle it.

The Illegal Art Exhibit will celebrate what is rapidly becoming the "degenerate art" of a corporate age: art and ideas on the legal fringes of intellectual property. Some of the pieces in the show have eluded lawyers; others have had to appear in court.

Loaded with gray areas, intellectual property law inevitably has a silencing effect, discouraging the creation of new works.

Should artists be allowed to use copyrighted materials? Where do the First Amendment and "intellectual property" law collide? What is art's future if the current laws are allowed to stand? Stay Free! considers these questions and others in our multimedia program

Editorial cartoon c 2002 by charles amsellem. "...We must consider the Spiritual genocide that they commit against us.... " "We must move to the time when we truly understand our connection to real power because these people who deal with illusions and imitations...they want to keep us confused with [the self-limiting concepts of?] sexism and ageism, racism, class. They want to keep us in a confusion so that [we] will continue to believe in one lie after another as they programmed them into our minds and into our society...The ruling class...are going to lie to us and they are going to create the illusions of change..." "We have to understand our role as a Natural Power. We have to understand that when our oppressor treats us this way and does these things to us, that we allow him to do it as long as we accept his lies...We have been allowing it for too long..." John Trudell

"This site is devoted to experimentation with, and civil disobedience against, intellectual property. By assembling these Frankentoons and placing them here on this site, I have knowingly, intentionally and deliberately infringed on copyrights owned by several corporations. I have also violated the "Terms of Use" of the web sites of these companies. The firms involved include Disney, Warner Brothers, United Feature Syndicate, King Features, and Paws Incorporated, among others. Because the content of this site is against the law, this site may be taken down by force at any time. Some activity has started already; the email exchange to date is here. (Also see the letter that United Features Syndicate sent to Joel's former host, resulting in the site's removal. -Webmaster). If you desire to do anything with any of the materials on this site, I encourage you to copy now whatever you want to use.

I am further violating the law by inciting others to commit crimes. I encourage all viewers of this site to engage in the following acts, without restriction or limit.

Assemble your own Frankentoons. It is very easy to do, and does not require advanced or expensive equipment. My computer--on which I did the bulk of the assembly of these Frankentoons--dates from 1997. The software that I used for most of the assembly was Microsoft Paint, which comes bundled with every recent version of Windows. For certain parts of the work, I used some products from Adobe, including PhotoDeluxe, PhotoShop, and PageMaker. There are many other graphics programs that can be used to assemble Frankentoons, including a number of shareware programs that are easy to download. The raw material for Frankentoons can be easily scanned in from newspapers, comic books, etc. Cartoon images can also be found at many web sites, including the sites belonging to the corporations listed above......."