Was thinking of this after a conversation I had on a thread about dreams. Someone joked “I was dreaming of the events of The Matrix, then I was woken up by someone worried my dream was infringing the Wachowski’s copyrights”, and it turned into a whole train of thought in my mind, like violating IP law because you stole fire from Zeus which was his intellectual property.
He doesn’t own it. He has an exclusive license to use it in art. Surrey NanoSystems Limited owns the patent on VantaBlack. Stuart Semple was so angry that Kapoor received that license that he had a blacker black material created and licensed it to anyone but Kapoor. When Kapoor obtained a sample anyway, Semple had a still blacker material created, to spite him.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/shortcuts/2019/aug/05/black-30-anish-kapoor-and-the-art-worlds-pettiest-funniest-dispute