Works can exceed their legal owners, creating obligations beyond title

Evidence

Tartt’s Pulitzer-winning novel pivots on the theft of Fabritius’s 1654 painting and follows Theo Decker as he hides, transports, and ultimately surrenders the canvas. Beyond the heist plot, the book is a meditation on object-attachment, the way art outlives its creators, and what cultural inheritance owes the dead. For IP scholarship that grapples with public domain, orphan works, and the duration debate, Tartt offers a long literary argument about works that exceed their owners. The book also dramatizes the criminal infrastructure surrounding masterworks: forgers, fences, restorers, customs officials. A useful companion text for thinking about how legal title differs from custodial care and from the moral claims of audiences and descendants. — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 408

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to public domain and orphan works debates in IP scholarship. — connects to: Excessive property rights can block beneficial use rather than enable it — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 2284; Economic property rights persist independent of legal recognition