Students in the American University Washington College of Law Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic recently completed work for John R. Whitman, founder of the Creative Prisons Project, an initiative dedicated to making prisons a leading source of creative expression. Mr. Whitman is working to build a field around prison-based creativity, with a particular focus on works eligible for copyright protection, and envisions the project reaching prisons and jails worldwide.

The Clinic’s representation centered on Mr. Whitman’s “Consent to Feature Use Project,” which aims to give art teachers in carceral settings a practical instrument for obtaining the rights they need, whether through transfer of ownership or a license, to exhibit, donate, or otherwise share the work of incarcerated artists, including with museums and other public venues. The goal is to remove a recurring barrier to the dissemination of art created inside prisons.

Clinic students Kurt Bauer and Paula Arraiza produced two deliverables. First, they drafted a template artwork ownership and copyright agreement for use between prison art teachers and incarcerated artists, structured to anticipate common contingencies such as future exhibitions, donations, capacity, witnesses, and successor claims, and accompanied by a plain-language explanation of each provision. Second, they prepared a companion copyright handout covering subject matter, originality, the exclusive rights, ownership, and Creative Commons licensing, so that teachers and artists using the template would understand the legal framework behind it

The resulting documents are intended to be offered to community members engaged in arts-in-corrections work and to serve as a building block for the broader field Mr. Whitman is helping to establish.

The Agreement can be found at this link:

https://creativeprisons.org/resources/Artwork-Ownership-Agreement-2026-06-15.docx