Editing Spiral Jetty (section)

==Ownership==
The sculpture was financed in part by a $9,000 [[United States dollar|USD]] grant from the [[Virginia Dwan]] Gallery of [[New York City|New York]]. In 1999, ''Spiral Jetty'' was donated to Dia. As owner and custodian of ''Spiral Jetty'', the foundation maintains the lease from the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire & State Lands of state sovereign lands in Great Salt Lake upon which the artwork is sited.

Smithson died in a plane crash in [[Texas]] three years after finishing the ''Spiral Jetty''.<ref name="pagel">{{cite web|url=http://www.nps.gov/gosp/tour/pagel.html|title=The Immobile Cyclone: Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty|last=Pagel|first=Angelika|publisher=National Park Service|work=nps.gov|access-date=November 6, 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080725201046/http://www.nps.gov/gosp/tour/pagel.html|archive-date=July 25, 2008|url-status=dead}}</ref>

[[File:Spiral-jetty-from-rozel-point.png|left|thumb|''Spiral Jetty'' from Rozel Point]]
Dia, along with the Holt/Smithson Foundation, claim ownership of [[copyright]] for ''Spiral Jetty''. However, the work itself does not meet the legal standard for copyrightable material, which in the [[Copyright law of the United States|United States]] includes the stipulation that a work must be "fixed" in a "tangible medium." While ''Spiral Jetty'' was created in a tangible medium, its inherent physical composition — piles of dirt, rocks, and salt that are subject to the erosive forces of the Great Salt Lake — means it is not fixed: "This lack of fixed form problematizes the work’s intellectual property protection. The heart of the work — the idea that it presents made manifest through an ephemeral environmental intervention — cannot be protected based on the guidelines provided under the Copyright Act."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Sallabedra |first1=Megan |title=Finding the Material: Collecting and Protecting Intellectual Property in Ephemeral Works of Art |journal=Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America |date=Fall 2019 |volume=38 |issue=2 |page=222 |url=https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/706834 |access-date=13 October 2023 |url-access=subscription}}</ref> Dia can and does claim copyright over images of ''Spiral Jetty'' created by the foundation. However, due to the physical work's lack of copyright protection, visitors do not need permission to create or publish their own photographs of the sculpture.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Sallabedra |first1=Megan |title=Finding the Material: Collecting and Protecting Intellectual Property in Ephemeral Works of Art |journal=Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America |date=Fall 2019 |volume=38 |issue=2 |page=223 |url=https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/706834 |access-date=13 October 2023 |url-access=subscription}}</ref>