The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

1. Live and Let Diner

Nothing is guaranteed to provoke a major media company into a righteous, indignant huff like someone monkeying with a copyrighted work of art.

Unless, of course, it's the major media company that's doing the monkeying. In that case, that same media company's attitude is, "Aw, it was just harmless fun. We were just fooling around. Lighten up."

Today's case in point: multimedia colossus AOL Time Warner (AOL Quote).

This is the company, you'll recall, whose Warner Bros. studio less than two years ago sent a barrage of threatening letters to kids who dared set up unofficial Harry Potter fan sites on the Web. According to press reports, in one case Warner sent a 15-year-old English girl a letter asking her to hand over a Web address because her site was likely to cause "consumer confusion" and dilution of Warner's intellectual property rights. Warner threatened legal action if she didn't quickly respond.

Fast-forward to just a few weeks ago, when we at the Five Dumbest Things Research Lab picked up one of those ubiquitous America Online software CD-ROMs from a display at our local post office.

The first thing we noticed was that AOL had decorated the cardboard folder holding the CD-ROM with a classic American painting: Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks," the famous study of four people around the counter of a diner. Gosh, we thought -- kudos to AOL for acknowledging an iconic American work of art.

But then we noticed something else: As high-class a painting as "Nighthawks" was, someone at AOL evidently had decided it wasn't high-class enough. So there, in the nighttime scene that the late Edward Hopper painted 61 years ago, someone from AOL had added something new: a laptop computer sitting on the counter, with its screen prominently displaying AOL's triangular logo.

'Night AOLs' Sprinkle some pixel dust on the bar

Have you no sense of decency, AOL?

A few questions popped into our minds here at the research lab. One: Was the Art Institute of Chicago, which owns and displays the original, a party to this travesty? Two: Whose laptop is this supposed to be, anyway? No one seems to be paying attention to it. And three: Does anyone at AOL have the slightest clue? You see, AOL relentlessly portrays itself as a tool for communication and community-creating. Yet the standard interpretation of "Nighthawks" is unrelentingly bleak. We quote from the Art Institute's Web site: "The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another."

No, Hopper's diner doesn't seem to be quite the place for AOL Instant Messenger and SuperBuddy icons.

The first thing we learned, once we started asking our questions, was that no one at the Art Institute knew that AOL had done this to "Nighthawks." "We're grateful that you brought this to our attention," said spokeswoman Eileen Harakal. This particular incident, she said, "really does cause us to reconsider and look at this kind of use."

AOL did indeed have permission to use the image, said Harakal, but she wasn't sure of the terms of this particular agreement -- whether AOL was allowed to add its laptop to the scene, or superimpose a larger version of its logo on a corner of the painting.

"We're constantly trying to weigh the responsible use of copyright," Harakal said, "vs. the income we derive from selling rights."

That being said, Harakal -- and here she's speaking for herself, not for the Art Institute -- doesn't believe that the scene in "Nighthawks" is as bleak and lonely as the standard interpretation. Granted, the people in the painting aren't talking to one another. But they're sitting there together. They're sharing coffee. They're in a warm, bright place instead of the cold, empty street. "There is, for that split second in time, a sense of community," she says.

Well, that's one opinion. Here's another: "It's outrageous," says Barbara Haskell, a curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art, which inherited Hopper's estate after his wife died.

Hopper "is able to encapsulate an essential aspect of the human condition -- a sense of isolation, of unfulfilled longing for human affection," says Haskell. What AOL, with its world of interconnectedness and instant community, is trying to suggest "is the exact opposite of Hopper's art," she says.

"It's no longer Hopper's artwork," she says. "They, in a sense, have stolen the image."

And AOL's response?