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This page considers the application of droit de suite in the US.

It covers -

• introduction
• studies

     introduction

In the US the droit has largely been regarded as a curiosity, a potential exotic import like a designer cheese or the bidet. There is no national scheme.

Proposals for a droit scheme in New York state were defeated but a similar law in California (here) has been in place for several years and does not appear to have destroyed the local market.

     in the US

A useful starting point is provided by two essays in Stephen Weil's A Cabinet Of Curiosities: Inquiries Into Museums & Their Prospects (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press 1996), Tom Camp's 1980 'Art Resale Rights and the Art Resale Market: An Empirical Study in 28 Bulletin of the Copyright Society of the USA and Jeffrey Wu's 1999 'Art resale rights and the art resale market: a follow up study' in Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA.

In 'Resale Royalties For Artists: Boon or Boondoggle' Weil discusses a 1992 inquiry by the US Registrar of Copyrights, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. That inquiry was mandated by the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA), the US federal version of Australia's Moral Rights legislation. His 'Resale Royalty Hearing: New York City' supplies Weil's testimony about the NY state proposals, with a brief discussion of economic and arts literature on droit de suite in the EU and the Californian state resale royalty arrangements.

Monroe Price's 1968 Yale Law Journal article Government Policy and Economic Security for Artists: The Case of the Droit de Suite seems to have set the tone for much US legal and economic thinking, reflected in Elliott Alderman's 1992 paper Resale Royalties in the United States for Fine Visual Artists: An Alien Concept and Bernhard Berger's 2001 comment Why Resale Rights for Artists Are a Bad Idea. There is a more positive approach in John Solow's 1991 An Economic Analysis of the Droit de Suite (PDF).

Peter Karlen's 'The California Droit de Suite' in Copyright World (1996) offers a view of the state legislation, complementing Diane Schulder's 1967 'Art Proceeds Act: a study of the droit de suite and a proposed enactment for the United States' in 19 Northwestern University Law Review 19, Shira Perlmutter's 1993 'Resale royalties for artists: an analysis of the Register of Copyrights’ report' in Journal of the Copyright Society of the United States of America, John Merryman's 1993 'The wrath of Robert Rauschenberg' in Journal of the Copyright Society of the United States of America, Michael Reddy's 1995 'The Droit de suite: why American fine artists should have the right to a resale royalty’ in 15 Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Journal and Jay Johnson's 1992 'Copyright: Droit de suite: An artist is entitled to royalties even after he's sold his soul to the devil' in 45 Oklahoma Law Review.

Overviews are provided by Edward Damich's 'Moral Rights Protection and Resale Royalties for Visual Art in the United States: Development & Current Status' in the 1994 Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, Gerhard Pfennig's broader 'The Resale Right of Artists (Droit de Suite)' in the 1997 Copyright Bulletin and Carla Shapreau's 'The Statute with teeth like a Gummy Bear: Droit de Suite in the US' in the April 1998 Art & Law Supplement to The Art Newspaper.

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