Velvet Underground Wants to Free Warhol's Banana

[The Straight Story]

Velvet Underground Wants to Free Warhol's Banana


MANHATTAN (CN) - Lou Reed and John Cale want to put the Andy Warhol-designed banana on the cover of their album "The Velvet Underground and Nico" in the public domain.

The Velvet Underground recorded the album in 1966, with the band splitting a royalty contract that had a $3,000 advance. Warhol agreed to design the front cover with a banana, a stylized signature, and a suggestive tagline "Peel slowly and see."

The album, which did not sell well at first, eventually was named the 13th "Greatest Album of All Time" by Rolling Stone in 2003, according to the federal complaint.
The lawsuit follows an April 8, 2011 report in The New York Times that the Andy Warhol Foundation claimed ownership of the image in negotiations involving smart phones and accessories.

"[T]he Andy Warhol Foundation [has] agreed to lend [Warhol's] work to a new series of iPhones and iPad cases, sleeves and bags from Incase. For the first in a series of four, they chose to focus on the iconic 1966 banana that Warhol created for the Velvet Underground's self-titled album," the Times reported, according to the complaint. (Brackets as in complaint.)

http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/01/12/42982.htm

[Motown_Johnny]

1. somebody needs to be fired

from the link in the OP

^snip^

"The Warhol Foundation has sought to justify its unlawful licensing activities involving the mark by asserting that it has a copyright interest in the banana design, despite the incontrovertible fact that the banana design, insofar as copyright rights are concerned, is in the public domain," the complaint states. "The banana design was first published in 1967, and continuously and repeatedly afterwards, without any copyright notice, and neither Andy Warhol, the Warhol Foundation, nor anyone else, has applied for registration of any copyright or deposited any sample of the work with the Copyright Office. Under the applicable copyright law - which is the Copyright Act in effect from July 1, 1909 through December 31, 1977 (the '1909 Act') - such publication without a copyright notice irrevocably placed the banana design in the public domain, if it was not there already."