For the past few years, British artist Anish Kapoor has been making use of his exclusive rights to something called Vantablack, a high-tech pigment touted as the blackest shade of black. His unique access, however, has sparked an escalating (and increasingly absurd) feud in the art world.

Developed by NanoSystems, the remarkable Vantablack pigment uses microscopic tubes oriented to capture light and deflect it internally rather than letting it bounce in a way visible to viewers. Designed for military and astronomical applications, it absorbs an incredible 99.96% of light.

But Kapoor’s usage rights have been criticized by other artists like painter Christian Furr who see it as monopolistic, limiting the potential of other creatives to explore artistic potential of the material.

“Using pure black in an artwork grounds it,” he notes. “All the best artists have had a thing for pure black – Turner, Manet, Goya. This black is like dynamite in the art world. We should be able to use it – it isn’t right that it belongs to one man.”

Recently, as a sort of satirical retaliation, British artist Stuart Semple created a flourescent pink pigment, designed to be the “pinkest pink” in the world. To drive the point home, the shade is available for purchase (just a few dollars per pot) to anyone on the planet except Kapoor, who is legally banned from buying the stuff.

Anyone placing an order has to agree that they are not Anish Kapoor, nor associated with him or purchasing it on his behalf. It is designed to be the exact opposite of the blackest black, reflecting a maximum amount of light to make it appear as garishly bright as possible.

Kapoor, however, managed to procure some anyway, posting images on social media and further fanning the flames of this off-color artistic war.

“I was really sad and disappointed that he felt so left out that he needed to orchestrate some conspiracy to steal our pink,” says Semple. “It would be nice if he owned up, said sorry and gave me my Pink back.” All in all, his reactions paint Kapoor as somewhat petty given his own exclusive use of the blackest black.

Semple, meanwhile, has also created the “world’s most glittery glitter”, “the “world’s greenest green” and the “world’s yellowest yellow” and is similarly banning Kapoor once again from these creations — at this point, presumably any reaction would paint Kapoor further into a corner.

The idea of artists “owning” a color is not unique to this particular feud. A deep shade of blue (International Klein Blue) was patented by an artist decades ago. Since his death, however, it has been used in various contexts, including by performers of the Blue Man Group.

Packing and shipping artwork is a delicate and costly process, unless your intention is to create new pieces by allowing them to break along the way. Starting in 2005, artist Walead Beshty began a decade-long project, sending works of art to galleries around the world with an important twist: the key element of their creation happened in transit.

Beshty would construct glass boxes to fit inside the cardboard shipping containers, matching their interior dimensions (no padding or other protection). Curators then unpacked the finished works, usually cracked but not totally destroyed (being constructed from shatter-proof glass).

Each piece was given a descriptive name including the date of shipment, tracking number and box dimensions, then put on display (resulting in titles like: FedEx® Large Box ©2005 FEDEX 139751 REV 10/05 SSCC, Priority Overnight, Los Angeles-New York trk#795506878000, November 27-28, 2007). In some cases, the glass contents are reshipped, changing form again and again as they move between exhibitions.

The net result is a work that tells the story of its own travels, particularly a period between leaving the hands of the artist and being received by a museum or collector. The displays vary, but in some cases the battered boxes become pedestals for the finished sculptural displays.

But beyond this fixation with the story behind the art, there is another element that drove Beshty: the “perversity of a corporation owning a shape” – as it turns out, FedEx has managed to copyright the dimensions of their box designs.

“They are basically a unit of space owned by a corporation in which to ship objects,” explains the artist. This idea of a company being able to “own” an empty volume of air designed to transport goods seemed surreal, and was another factor motivating this unusual mobile art project.

Seated at the center of a new design-related copyright conversation, a series of Eiffel chairs sold by discount superstore Aldi has designers arguing on both sides.

The chairs in question look significantly like the DSW Eames Plastic Chair (designed by Charles and Ray Eames in 1950), currently made by copyright holders Vitra in Switzerland.

Critics point out that Aldi has been caught doing this before, selling things like Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Chair on countries where it can avoid copyright entanglements, either because the copyrights have expired or replicas are permitted by law.

Defenders of the discount retailer argue that the entire point of these plastic chairs was to create something cheap, comfortable and easy to mass produce. In other words: the fact that replicas sell for 40 GBP and licensed remakes sell for ten times that goes against the intent of the designers.

Either way, Aldi seems to way to stay out of the fray, perhaps planning to hide behind slight design differences when it comes to the structure, materials and details of the seats.

In some places, like the United Kingdom, changes to laws have been proposed or are in the works, which may provide additional protections for rights holders now and into the future.

There is a larger question at work here though too: how close do designs have to be for them to risk creating intellectual property controversies? There are, after all, only so many ways to plan, design and construct a chair for a human occupant. These days, so many 3D models of seats have been uploaded to programs like SketchUp and it is easier than ever to simply cut, paste and print a copy of one’s own on a 3D printer.

Canadian land artist and sculptor Peter von Tiesenhausen occupies a stretch of land in Alberta covered with his artworks, but it was not until he turned the top six layers of the soil on his 800 acres of land itself from private to intellectual property that he was able to fend off encroaching corporate interests.

In Canada, a landowner has surface rights but must allow the government to grant paid subterranean access, allowing companies to create or mine passageways, pipelines, minerals or other natural resources below the ground.

They are compensated, per This.org, and “this compensation is usually for lost harvests and inconvenience, but, Tiesenhausen reasoned, what if instead of a field of crops these companies were destroying the life’s work of an acclaimed visual artist? Wouldn’t the compensation have to be exponentially higher?”

Effectively, by contacting a lawyer and protecting the surface of his land as intellectual property, he has prevented anyone from breaching that surface without compensation, which, for a work of art, could be essentially any amount. While oil companies could contest his claim, so far they have settled for costly reroutes, perhaps to avoid losing and setting a precedent that could hurt them more in the long run.

“I’m not trying to get money for my land, I’m just trying to relate to these companies on their level,” says Tiesenhausen from his home near Demmitt, Alberta. “Once I started charging $500 an hour for oil companies to come talk to me, the meetings got shorter and few and far between.”

Now an artist, Tiesenhausen has a great deal of experience with natural resource companies, having worked in oil fields, mining gold and even crushing boulders for airstrips earlier in life before turning to large-scale works of land and installation art and sculpture.

Cantech Letter notes of the clever strategy, “This is eerily similar to the defense Portia deploys against Shylock in ‘The Merchant of Venice’ in which he is legally entitled to extract a pound of flesh from a debtor who can’t pay, so long as he doesn’t extract a single drop of blood or marrow or bone.”

Phantom settlements and trap streets are faked or falsified, intentionally introduced (or materially altered) by map makers to catch those who would copy them. And the practice is not limited to towns or roads – there are trap ponds, trap parks, trap buildings and trap sidewalks, too.

Now imagine the same thing applied to indoor spaces being mapped by new mobile device apps: trap rooms, halls, closets and stairwells – entirely fake spaces that could at worst confuse, but at best might become targets of offbeat geo-locational games.

BldgBlog (image above by Laura Pedrick for The New York Times) speculates about introducing false information to interior maps of places like shopping malls:

“Nothing sinister—you don’t want people fleeing toward an emergency stairway that doesn’t exist in the event of a real-life fire—but why not an innocent janitorial closet somewhere or a freight elevator that no one could ever access in the first place? Why not a mysterious door to nowhere, or a small room that somehow appears to be within the very room you’re standing in?”

Unlike some paper streets (example shown above), which are planned but never become a reality, trap streets and phantom settlements (like Argleton, a faux town depicted below) are fictitious creations from the start, designed to mislead copyists into revealing their own copyright infringement. Normally innocuous (like: renaming or bending a road), you think of them as equivalent to programmer’s Easter Egg or a hidden watermark  on a photograph – a buried surprise in everyday maps.

But what are the implications of doing this on a smaller scale of pedestrian circulation, deceiving people not by square mile, but by cubic feet? Could you frustrate the janitorial staff at a school, scare someone into imagining a secret room in their apartment complex? Would it trick urban explorers into actually physically trapping themselves? We will set these open questions aside and leave you with a little fun fact: while designed to catch copiers, trap streets cannot themselves be copyright.