Terracotta warriors shot down as clay pigeons in Germany

Check out the following story from The Guardian on a recent scam turned scandal at a museum in Hamburg, Germany: Kate Connolly, "Fake warriors 'art crime of decade', say German critics." Apparently the Museum of Ethnology believed representations that eight clay sculptures were eight of the terracotta warriors unearthed in the 1970s in Xi'an, China, despite the source of the sculptures (and the provider of supposed certificates of authenticity), the Leipzig exhibition company called Centre of Chinese Arts and Culture (CCAC), had already toured the works as copies two years before. A royal mess, with no small degree of irony in that authorities in China -- the home of the global forged or copied art industry -- blew the whistle. I love the following quotation from the story:

China's state office for the administration of cultural artefacts in Beijing said it was likely that the exhibits were illegal copies. "It looks like this is a problem with the protection of copyright," he told the German media.

I will do a little investigation into transnational copyright law, but in general I am pretty sure that copyright does not enter the picture for works of art that are 2000 years old. In most domestic law systems and in international treaties, copyright law generally does not apply if the artist has been dead for more than 70 years. It is lawful to copy a Titian painting, for example, but one cannot attempt to sell or achieve any other economic benefit from it by farudulently presenting it as an original. Fraudulent commerce by the Leipzig company and possible the Hamburg museum, if it was in fact on notice there were not real, can be a crime and certainly a private-law breach of contract, but copyright does not seem likley to be in play here. That said, it may be that some area of copyright law allows copyright to start only from the moment of discovery of historic art or Chinese law may treat national cultural property as under copyright regardless of when the individual authors lived. I will do some checking.