Nominal Fix

Turns out you can’t find the Paul Rudolph Foundation on Instagram, but you can find the Paul Rudolph Institute of Modern Architecture (PRIMA), fka the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation, because the latter filed thirty-plus DCMA complaints about the former, which ended up losing its Instagram account as a result. (The case was settled over the summer.) Maybe this isn’t the most salient aspect of the dispute, which also entangled a third entity, the Estate of Paul Rudolph. Rudolph, the person, died in 1997 shortly after altering his will, which he did shortly after coming out of a coma, to leave money—and, apparently, some IP—to his friend Ernst Wagner, who now heads up the estate and has claimed the IP. There was uncertainty over whether some of Rudolph’s intellectual property lay with the Library of Congress, as he specified in an earlier will from 1996, or PRIMA, per that later will. And a whole lot of back and forth about discovery. I read the court case so you don’t have to, but you should: it’s a wild look at the real-world effects of social media; the lasting implications of deathbed desires; and the very odd legacy of one of the oddest architects ever to practice.