Google search results for “Lady Gaga infringement”: 630,000
For “Lady Gaga copyright”: 270,000,000
That’s a lot of Intertubes about Lady Gaga and copyright. 
Sifting the results, though, turns up little by way of actual actions. She threatened to sue the maker of a “Lady Gag Gag” sex doll, for instance; and action against her has been threatened by an alleged co-writer.
(If anyone knows of other actions, please comment — I just haven’t time to sift all two hundred and seventy million results!)
Rather more of the results have to do instead with Gaga’s perceived lack of originality, pointing out rather obvious similarities between her image and music and those of Madonna, or, say, between her meat dress and Canadian sculptor Jana Sterbak’s 1987 meat dress.
I had bristled at first that Lady Gaga so nakedly plagiarized the meat dress. 
But it now occurs to me that what she’s doing in music and fashion combined is oddly representative of today’s remix culture, in a political climate of ever more restrictive IP regulation. Lady Gaga, a major presence in both fashion and music now, is, in a way, bringing something of the copyright-indifferent business practices of the former — in which “there’s very little intellectual property protection” — to bear on the copyright-mad business practices of the latter.
Maybe not intentionally, maybe just inadvertently.
In any case, the various productions and performances of Lady Gaga stand open to some very suggestive interpretation, as critical statements on the present state of tensions and negotiations between the corporate-backed hegemony of “originality” and the creativity of open appropriation.
Update: 
I’ll take this story about Lady GaGa’s endorsement of a little Canadian girl who covered “Born this way” on Youtube as some solid evidence supporting my hunch here.
The Youtube vid in question is pretty excellent.
UPDATE 2.0! TorrentFreak confirms that “Lady Gaga Is a BitTorrent Loving Pirate.”
Apparently “she asked her fans to send a torrent (or YouTube) link of the Top Chef Just Desserts finale.”
Now, about that thing with the photographers…
http://twitter.com/#!/isohunt/status/129807927044358144
Academicalism 