Archive for ‘copyright/trademark’

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Cartoon and Comics Links: Wallace and Gromit and other cool stuff

by Colleen Doran on February 20th, 2012
Posted In: Blog, Creator Resources, copyright/trademark, Creator Resources, Creator Resources, Money Management, Creator Resources, Publishing

At the UK Daily Mail, a look at Wallace and Gromit, with lots of cool schematic drawings and info on development. Also, creator Nick Park’s first animated video, created when he was only 13 years old.

Cartooning for a sustainable future at Columbia Journalism Review. Newspaper cartoonists face the grim reality that their business model is a goner.

Ted Rall discovers that one of his syndicated cartoons made a whopping 8 cents. This article is a bit depressing, and outside of the occasional crow-worthy kickstarter campaign, I’m really not sure what the future is for these folks. Some have modest luck with self syndication.

“I have a big web audience,” says Bors, “and a lot of my cartoons are incredibly popular. They fly around the web more than a lot of articles do, but for whatever reason, cartoons aren’t on the budget.”

Read it all.

Missed it. Valentine’s Day cards from days of yore. They weren’t very nice.

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Thought for the day…

by Colleen Doran on January 18th, 2012
Posted In: Blog, Creator Resources, copyright/trademark, Creator Resources

If our work didn’t create an audience, then no one would pirate our work. We need to address the cognitive disconnect that separates the audience from the human source of what they enjoy or consume. If you like what we produce, support with dollars. There are plenty of people out there who simply do not care if they take our images and put them on t-shirts, coffee mugs and prints from which we make nothing. It’s not just about digital books, it’s about widespread use of what we generate that returns nothing to the source. We need to address this, not in an adversarial way with our public, but in a way that makes them understand the social consequences of their actions. Consuming content or product that does not return value to the source that generated it is an act of social irresponsibility.

Support the artist. Be a patron.

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Marvel vs Kirby: Audio Smackdown

by Colleen Doran on November 8th, 2011
Posted In: Blog, Culture, Comics, Comics History, Creator Resources, copyright/trademark, Creator Resources, Legal

The Comics Journal blog has audio of the discussion between Steve Bissette “…founding faculty member of the Center for Cartoon Studies” and outspoken creator rights advocate, and Professor Oliver Goodenough, Professor of Law and Director of Scholarship at the Vermont Law School. “Marvel vs. Jack Kirby: Legal Rights and Ethical Might”.

I’m just going to quote from the comments, because I’m going to the other side of the planet and have no time to blog responsibly.

The key to the case was the attempt by Toberoff to show, that like Siegel and Shuster, Kirby brought characters to the publisher he created at home, by himself, with no understanding he would be paid.
That is why the judge said Marvel’s case “stands or falls on his (Lee’s) testimony.”

Countering this was the testimony of Lee who categorically said he alone created every single character and basic plot by himself, and then assigned the cartoonists to illustrate his concepts.

That is why the judge said Marvel’s case “stands or falls on his (Lee’s) testimony.”

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Arts and Letters Links. And Three Black Hearts to go.

by Colleen Doran on November 1st, 2011
Posted In: Blog, Colleen's Work, Creator Resources, copyright/trademark, Culture, Culture, Fine Art, Creator Resources, Legal

Over at my portfolio website, I posted an entire out-of-print short story, “Three Black Hearts”. I’d hoped to find time to color it, but maybe I will leave that task for some new print story collection.

Here’s page one of the tale.

Also, art and business linkage. Cool stuff.

In praise of hand lettering at The New York Times.

On the surface, this riotously raw lettering looks like it was produced by those who are incapable of rendering letters with any semblance of accuracy or finesse. And while this may or may not be true, a decade or so ago, this lettering was a critical reaction to the computer’s cold precision.

10 Reasons Why Prince Valiant is the bestest adventure strip hero ever.

He’s part Errol Flynn, part gritty badass, part Joseph Campbell myth on the make, part nostalgic vessel for our grandparents’ yearning for some more civilized age, part Mel Gibson-style torture survivor, even part MMORPG knight slowly accumulating levels and power and inventory.

He’s my all-time favorite comic. And the only comic I truly collect.

Ten great child geniuses in literature.

…the more compelling characteristic of the child genius is the fact that he is alone in what is many ways a foreign world. After all, alienation, in our digital world, is one of the most defining themes of our generation, something that occupies everyone.

Something you should never do: respond to your critics. Never ever respond to them like this. And don’t let your family do it, either. Michael Chabon’s wife has meltdown on Twitter. V. sad, because I respect the Chabons.

BTW, I really need to clean out my bookmarks.

If someone hasn’t written a book about this yet, I sure wish they would. Reclusive art love/heiress Huguette Clark and her eccentric ways. And to make this story even more frustrating, her art was selling on ebay recently for a song, and I couldn’t afford any of it at the time. I assume people did not recognize her name: her work had a storybook quality. It was quite nice. I imagine a little context would have sent those prices soaring.

The daughter of a disgraced former U.S. senator, Huguette inherited millions from the Montana copper mines, and has lived a solitary life while her three fabulous homes sit empty: a $100 million estate on the Pacific Coast in Santa Barbara, a $24 million country house in Connecticut and a $100 million co-op, the largest apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park — all immaculately kept but unoccupied for decades.

As Huguette has just marked her 104th birthday in an ordinary hospital room in New York, there are unanswered questions as well:

Who protects an old lady who secluded herself from the world, limiting her life to a single room, playing dress-up with her dolls and watching cartoons? Who protects an old lady whose Stradivarius violin, the famous one called “The Virgin,” which her mother gave her as a 50th birthday present, has been sold secretly for $6 million? Who protects an old lady whose dearest friend, a social secretary to whom Huguette supposedly gave $10 million, now has Alzheimer’s and is unable to visit anymore? Who protects an old lady who has no children, and whose distant relatives have been prevented from visiting her? Who protects an old lady whose accountant fell behind on his own federal income taxes and is a convicted felon and a registered sex offender?

Two very fine articles with pics at MSNBC.

And here.

Fascinating stuff.

Robert Levine, author of Free Ride, at Salon.

The premise of my book is that most online companies rely for their content, and hence for their money, on traditional media companies. If they destroy that business model, it’s unclear what they’re going to have to distribute. If you look at YouTube, eight of the top 10 videos are major-label music videos. If the major labels shrank to the point where they can’t make videos, YouTube isn’t much of a business. It’s still a great social phenomenon, but it’s not much of a business.

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CREATOR RIGHTS LINKS: Getting Paid, Getting Robbed

by Colleen Doran on October 11th, 2011
Posted In: Blog, Creator Resources, copyright/trademark, Creator Resources, Creator Resources, Legal, Creator Resources, Money Management, Creator Resources, Publishing

I’m a bad blogger for not updating more frequently, so here’s a linkpalooza of cool things to read.

Boy do I need to clean out my bookmarks.

At the New York Times, “Begging for Your Pay”.

He waited on $31,000 through November 2009; by February, the company still owed him $20,000. Wisdom, who said he had had a perfect credit score until then, racked up over $20,000 in credit card debt, and his bank raised his interest rates to 30 percent. He was paying more than $500 a month in credit card interest, and withdrew from his retirement accounts to make ends meet.

I feel your pain, dude. It’s been over a year, and a producer still hasn’t forked over the dough.

China and Intellectual Property.

Bootleg copies of the “Dark Knight” and Shenzen sweatshops churning out fake Louis Vuitton bags are only part of the problem. Last March, the United States International Trade Commission banned imports of cast steel railway wheels made by the Chinese group Tianrui. Tianrui had hired nine employees from the Chinese licensee of Amsted Industries of Chicago, a maker of railway parts. They came with an armful of trade secrets that allowed Tianrui to muscle into the business.

What really happened to htmlcomics. You may recall I had a run-in with this scary dude, a convicted felon pirating comics, some time ago. He followed up my post several times with some vaguely threatening emails, odd complaints I had lied about his kindly cooperation with my request he stop pirating my work (read the link and decide for yourself,) and demands to remove anything I had ever said about him online, all of which I ignored. I did not publish any of his later emails, especially after learning what he did to this cop who pissed him off. That’s so not normal. I just handed the letters to my attorney.

He also made the odd claim that he had been released from “all charges”. Whatever charges he thinks they were, the real story is that he was sued by the federal government and had his servers and websites permanently shut down and forfeited. You can read all about it at Copyhype.

Copyhype’s article also lays to rest some of the online cheering from people who claim they had the dude shut down via their blog posts or something. The investigation began in 2009.

The case of htmlComics.com is, as far as I know, the first time a domain name has been forfeited under 18 USC § 2323(a) as property “used, or intended to be used, in any manner or part to commit or facilitate the commission of” criminal copyright infringement.

And while my bottom line has gone up considerably since I first wrote about the perils of digital book filching, I’m chalking that up to the many thousands I spent on advertising, having the website redone, and other rather expensive incentives, not to mention my ubiquitous web presence.

I’m also working with Image Comics to create A Distant Soil digital books. The first 14 issues of A Distant Soil were not published by Image, and they are undergoing a major cleanup operation. They also require new covers and will have some new content. They should be available soon, but this art is more than 20 years old, and digital files did not exist back in the day. We’re doing major restoration here.

I also hope you enjoy the online comic experience at my official website. It’s been fun bringing it to you.

Jaron Lanier declares “Web 2.0 is utterly pathetic.”

“Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine,” says Lanier, “but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.”

At Plagiarism Today: “Why I don’t Fear Chilling Effects.” Chilling Effects sometimes posts the personal information of people who file takedown notices for copyright infringement online. I think that’s kind of creepy. Here’s another take on the matter.

First, the name Chilling Effects, to many copyright holders, sounds very accusatory. Though Chilling Effects “aims to support lawful online activity against the chill of unwarranted legal threats” it does so by being an impartial database of notices. Not every notice in Chilling Effects is “chilling” free speech in any way, in fact, the vast majority are not.

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