Webcomics Copyright Violation Follies
on December 22nd, 2010Fleen reports on an aggregator site scraping the content of a number of popular webcomics, and posting the contents in toto on their web page. This copyright and trademark violation deprives creators of income from their work which is available at their advertiser supported websites for fans to read for free.
The pinched comics include Buttersafe, Questionable Content, Perry Bible Fellowship, Dilbert, A Softer World, and many others.
The site is registered to an Andrew Fuchs, and Fleen has the contact details. Fuchs’ address is listed in Brooklyn, but the registrar is in Singapore. The Facebook fan page says the site was “Founded by Matt Barnett, Andrew Fuchs, Tim Pearson, and Kevin Postal in May 2010″.
Someone needs to get a special Christmas message takedown.
What’s interesting about news such as this is a few weeks back, a webcomic artist posted a link to an article which was criticizing your article about copyright protection and piracy. He was supporting the opposition; but then a few days later he was going after someone who was posting his webcomic elsewhere and criticizing another comic for supposedly using a joke that he had written.
Sort of a mentality of “everything should be free, except for my work”.
There were a couple of articles out there that deliberately and maliciously misrepresented both what I wrote and the context of the article.
Some claimed that I wrote it in support of legislation that did not even exist at the time I wrote the piece, which was part of a Graphic Artist Guild submission of statements to the Intellectual Property Coordinator. I mentioned this last March.
Fellow creator rights activists said my writing might make a good Op Ed for the Washington Post or the like, and after some editing, the article was submitted and shuffled around various venues over some months before it finally got placed.
Another claimed that because I don’t “engage with the public,” my work is a failure. Which is a lie on both counts, of course.
I just had three works removed from Scrib’d this week. None of them ADS. Which has enjoyed an increase in income over the last year, BTW. I have roughly 2 dozen works in print which are eligible for royalties, but when I wrote that “my work” was pirated, some assume the only work I meant was A Distant Soil. So they could go on bizarre gay-bashing rants about it, I suppose. Followed by death threats and hacks. Classy.
I hate to burst the schadenfreude bubble of a few who “didn’t get their dream job, either,” but not only did the traffic on this site go up nearly 1.7 million page views this year, but the income on ADS is higher than it has been in years. I won’t be living on this income alone, but then, I don’t have to. This isn’t about one book. And I have lots of books.
Creator rights activism doesn’t begin and end with comics. Every creator of every kind should have the right to determine what is done with their work.
The sort of creator who objects to creator rights speech until the creator rights violated are their own…just sad. But typical.
This is an ideological issue. People are dirty about it. And a lot of that dirt centers around an “I’ve got mine, so screw you,” attitude. Until someone screws them, of course.
Anyway, I mentioned on this site on several occasions over the past couple of years that I had personal problems including a debilitating health issue that made work difficult for some time. I’d like to continue to keep the details personal. But I am very happy to have regular work and be back on my feet.
How nasty of some to dance with glee at the prospect that any financial problems I might have were entirely due to lousy sales on my unpopular work. Having my work pinched by total strangers doesn’t help one bit, and that’s the point.
Royalties are what creators get in lieu of employee benefits. They help tide us over when the going gets rough. For some work, back end royalties are the only payments creators get: there are no page rates or advances.
And yet to some, royalties smack of “creator privilege”. You know, if you can’t hack it, get a day job! Assuming I’d be able to get out of bed and work a day job. It makes more sense for me to stay in bed and draw a comic while I am not healthy than it does for me to clerk at the Piggly Wiggly and cough and hack and spew at the customers, don’t you think?
I’d say having a number of books that still earn money after many years is not a mark of failure, but of success. The fact that I was able to meet my base expenses while working at home part time and collecting those royalties (even when they are not what they used to be) until I was able to get back on the work treadmill is a mark of great success.
I am really happy and grateful for every penny of those royalties, and deeply grateful to all my honest readers.
We will need a fifth printing of A Distant Soil Volume I next year, and a second printing of Volume IV.
Thank you.
“A Distant Soil” is SO unpopular that it has been in print in one form or another since 1983.
That is something very few comic properties outside of DC & Marvel can claim.
Seriously some people are just jerks.
Sheesh. Go figure.
FYI, I wrote an edit of the article in May and another a bit later (around late August/September) adding my thoughts about Vertigo. Some of us at Vertigo knew of major changes coming and were informed in the spring of ’10, but we were asked to keep quiet.
I don’t know what some crazy people are thinking, but I don’t have Congress on speed dial. My political influence does not mean what some people think it means.
Anyway, thanks for your nice comments. A book doesn’t stay in print unless it continues to sell. Just because it does not make me rich, that does not mean it doesn’t sell.
A Distant Soil sells in the same range as Age of Bronze, and better than books like Castle Waiting.
We should all just get day jobs.
I think very few people grasp that it’s not common to get rich from comics. That people don’t do comics for the money or the glory (the ones who do end up not lasting long in the industry, I’d venture to guess), but because there is a real love of the medium.
I think people just assume that you make lots of money up front when you turn in those pages and they get published, therefore you should not be complaining when your work gets pirated or ripped-off and you lose royalties… you made all that money up front and are now are just being greedy. What I look at is this: George Perez and Marv Wolfman are responsible for some of the most popular and constantly in-print comics of all time (Crisis On Infinite Earth has probably been in print longer than most collections) and yet both men are still working regularly in comics and Mr. Perez still does conventions and commissioned art. Obviously they are still getting royalties from some of the most popular comics out there, but they are having to supplement that with current material.
And as you’ve said many times, there is no healthcare, no retirement, no stock options as a freelance creator.
I just wish people would get it. I have begun to sadly suspect most people don’t want to get it because then they would have to judge their actions differently and might feel bad about them. God-forbid that happen.
Anyway… enough of this ranting.!
I hope you have a Merry Christmas Colleen, and I am looking forward to all of your new work in the coming year. Thank you for making yourself available to your fans through this site and Facebook.
This is not solely a problem with comics or even creative professions in general though it maybe more glaring in the arts than other minimum-wage professions. There are a few general assumptions that like a lot of general assumptions, are either entirely or partially not true. One is that artist would get directly all the money from the sale of a product. Sure, if you sell minicomics or t-shirts you made by hand at home, you get all the proceeds. Minus the expenses. And somehow no one ever considers the expenses. Cost of minicomic = 2$, material costs = 50cents, time and effort used in making the comic from scratch by hand = unquantifiable, profit from selling a minicomic = something between 1,50$ and minus infinity. If it is a comic published through a major publisher, with all the bells and whistles with the glossy materias and stuff, your profit might still be about 1,50$ per sold copy even if a copy costs 15$ at the store. And I don’t know how often the artist has any say in what the cover price is.
The other thing people want to ignore is that even though your work is something that you enjoy (at least most of the time) you’re still entitled to make a living out of it. It’s like most people consider that a just due; that if you like what you do your pound of flesh is not to make a living out of it. It makes me sad every time I talk to someone and they say no one likes their job and just continue to be unhappy with their lot.
It’s such a big tangled mess of unhappiness that whole everyone-for-themselves mess. :T
Ah, sorry for being a Debbie Downer. Should just stick to dribbling all over my own blog with these things. Anyhow, hope everyone is having a massively awesome holiday right about now.
Hey, no worries. I have 1.7 million more page views of reasons to think A Distant Soil has a nicely increasing audience base. Were those all paid readers, I would not have a care in the world.
That said, it’s more readers than I ever had in print, and I look forward to bringing all of you nice things in future.
And I will continue to be diligent about standing up for other creator’s rights, as well as my own rights. I have no doubt taking down illegal PDF’s of my books and promoting this site has helped bring readers where they ought to be.
Here instead of over there.
Happy Holidays to all!