Curator Steve Dietz:
The fact that Minds of Concern is potentially undermined by the legal system in the form of a standard or "shrinkwrap" license the New Museum has with its ISP is not insignificant. It is precisely a legal bug and the strategy by which so much of the public domain in the U.S., at least, escapes Constitutional and other legal protections by entering into [voluntarily?] contractual agreements that void and/or supercede these supposed rights.

Commment Mailing List Lachlan Brown:
Indeed, the distinction between assumed rights and legal guarantee of rights, public and private, residesin an interstitial state. Not a 'grey area' to be filled in between the public and private by new conditions for cyber' space, but a contest in which like a Venn Diagramme the public and private vie over the terrain they both occupy.
Add to this the interests of several dozen States, thousands of public service institutions hundreds of thousands of companies and millions of users, well... . What would we call it? War? Wrestling? or Seduction? A Million times a million contests. Cultural confusion.These webs of the law are durable and have easy translation to the new media distributive terrain. Despite word play or administrative/bureaucratic assumptions of power. The really interesting fact is that States, institutions, companies, individuals, but not collectivities like artists, writers, coders, primary producers and so on, are beginning to 'stand-off' this terrain. We might, after all, consider a return to the question of the aesthetic, and then of policy, and thenof law over several years. It will become clear as we do so that we NEED insitutions, new institutions perhaps, that are able to host the work you do.