Katherine de Vos Devine writes about, teaches, and practices IP law at the intersection of art history, feminist theory, and cultural economics.
IP attorney and art historian — both, simultaneously.
I’m an intellectual property attorney with a J.D. and Ph.D. in Art History. I co-founded Implement Legal to provide copyright, trademark, and transactional counsel to creative businesses that need a lawyer who understands the ecosystem, not just the law.
My dissertation examined appropriation art and fair use doctrine in the 1990s and 2000s — Sherrie Levine, Jeff Koons, and the generation of artists who built careers on images they didn’t make. The argument I kept making: transformative use doctrine had become cover for powerful artists to strip-mine working creators — treating their work as raw material, not authorship.
Now tech companies run the identical argument to justify training AI on copyrighted work without permission or payment. The extraction logic doesn’t change. It just finds a new vehicle.
Before law, I ran museums and arts organizations. That matters because I’ve sat on the other side of the table. I know what it’s like when your gallery owner is also your friend. When your collaborator becomes your client. When the person across the negotiating table will be at the next ten openings. That’s the ecosystem I work in, and my practice has to account for it.
Law
Copyright strategy and enforcement. Trademark prosecution and defense. Business acquisitions and sales for creative businesses. Licensing agreements, gallery representation, commission structures, estate planning. I serve galleries, production companies, agencies, and creative businesses navigating complex IP challenges. My current scholarship applies property theory and feminist analysis to copyright doctrine — from the structural confusion that lets artists’ estates assert rights the law never granted them, to the practitioner ecosystems that determine whether new legal forms actually work.
Advocacy
I have shaped IP policy from inside the creative community — working with the College Art Association’s Committee on Intellectual Property, and through public writing, conference presentations, and direct engagement with legislation affecting artists. Policy built before the court decision is more useful than commentary written after.
Teaching
I teach IP law at universities and cultural institutions, and I teach it from the argument rather than the rule. Students encounter fair use through Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith — not through the four-factor test in the abstract. They learn what a licensing agreement actually does by drafting one for a situation they recognize. The doctrine follows the problem; it doesn’t precede it.
I’ve taught Arts & Entertainment Law and Art Law at Queens University of Charlotte, and delivered guest lectures at Yale School of Art, the University of Rochester, and Western North Carolina University. Professional workshops have taken me to the Center for Craft, Mountain Bizworks, Rhode Island School of Design, Mass MoCA, and arts organizations across North Carolina.
I believe that legal education is most powerful when it reaches people who don’t yet know they need it. That belief shapes how I teach, who I teach, and what I think universities owe their students.
Writing
I write about intellectual property law — for law reviews, for working artists, and for the curious public.
Four law review articles are in active development: one applying classical property theory to artists’ estates and fair use doctrine, one analyzing the practitioner ecosystem a new Colorado corporate form requires but actively suppresses, one arguing that Justice Kagan’s celebrated Warhol dissent imports a male-dominated critical lineage into copyright doctrine with consequences for whose creative labor the law recognizes as art, and one developing an original framework — recursive enclosure — arguing that AI companies’ extraction of copyrighted creative work and their extraction of physical land for data infrastructure form an accelerating feedback loop, each cycle enabling and requiring the next. The scholarship starts in public, stress-tested against readers who will say when the argument doesn’t hold, before it reaches peer review.
Protect Your Magic on Substack is where that testing happens — connecting copyright law to commons theory, feminist analysis, and the recursive logic by which creative labor gets enclosed, digitized, and extracted before the law has caught up.
The Secret Weapon on LinkedIn carries the argument to creative business owners who need to understand what IP doctrine actually means to their work, their contracts, and their leverage.