Legal

Jason St. Clair over at Comicbook Galaxy writes on the growing online piracy of comic books. St. Clair’s article is a detailed overview of the methods and pyschology of this particular flavor of online pirates. Given the ease with which comic books appear to be pirated I can only imagine that the industry’s lower overall net worth vis a vis movies and music is why comic book piracy is not given substantial attention in the media.

Thanks to Spurgeon for the the link to this story. Continue Reading →

USA Today has a story on Marvel suing City of Heroes videogame publisher NCSoft.

The jist of this seems to be that Marvel claims injuries from the fact that City of Hero allows players to design, among 1000s of possibilities, heroes that look somewhat like Marvel, and to name, among all possible combinations of letters, the heroes with Marvel superhero names. It’s not clear from the USA Today story whether this suit is based on trademark or copyright or both, but on first glance, Marvel might as well sue Adobe for making Photoshop and Microsoft for making Word. Continue Reading →

Another program to read comics that fetches images directly from servers. The creator’s FAQ acknowledges some of the tensions such programs create for the artists who create webcomics:

Q: Don’t you rip off the artists when you view the strips, but not the ads?

A: Ad revenue on the web is so low these days, comic artists have already added (or completely switched to) many other support models. And I encourage everybody to make those models work for them. Please buy books or T-shirts, join their clubs, tip them money, do visit their homepages and click on some ads… I do regularly!

These programs appear to be here to stay – how will they impact the “free” model so many webcomics, even highly successful ones, continue to employ? Is bandwidth cheap enough that a program such as this that can “rip” an entire archive of image files will not cause financial problems for creators? What other issues surrounding distribution of webcomics are on your mind this week? Continue Reading →

Love him or hate him, you have to be feeling a little sorry for Todd McFarlane after being hit with a $15 million judgement in a lawsuit filed against him by “the toughest guy in hockey,” Tony Twist. Continue Reading →

From a Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) news post:

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund applauds yesterday’s Supreme Court decision upholding the ban on the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a federal law which would have banned content providers from posting First Amendment protected “harmful to minors” materials online.
(The full article is posted below) Continue Reading →

Comic Slurper is an online comics aggregator, taking webcomic images and displaying their latest installment on a single html page. Slurper gives visitors the ability to decide which of the menu of comics (both comic strips and webcomics are among the choices) to appear on the page for them. It also offers the ability to create a customized RSS/XML feed of those comics. (It even offers a PDA friendly version).

It’s a nice looking page with an easy to use interface that provides a personalized comics portal. It’s also doubtful that all of the comics are used with creators’ permission since several are owned by large newspaper syndicates who have traditionally not allowed for such reuse of their copyrighted material. We have requested comment from the site (there is no identifying information at the site other than “Dark Gate Corporation”) on their policy with regards to creator permission and will post if we get a reply. Continue Reading →

A few authors have had semi-high profile experiments with releasing their books both in traditional printed version, available for cash and in non-traditional electronic version, available for free and licensed under a Creative Commons license.

Over at the Chocolate and Vodka blog, Suw Charman has a lengthy essay on this develpment and in particular the flurry of activity surrounding Larry Lessig’s book Free Culture which after a release under a liberal Creative Commons license was translated, recorded and wiki-fied.

Comic creators who work on the web have similar opportunities to explore these non-traditional strategies. Can giving away webcomics lead to success? Continue Reading →

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund warns that a recent bill introduced in the House of Representatives could give parents the power to sue anyone disseminating any media containing “material that is harmful to minors.”

H.B. 4239, also called the “Parents’ Empowerment Act,” would allow the parent or guardian of a minor to sue in federal court anyone who knowingly disseminates any media containing “material that is harmful to minors” if the material is distributed in a way that “a reasonable person can expect a substantial number of minors to be exposed to the material and the minor, as a result to exposure to the material, is likely to suffer personal or emotional injury or injury to mental or moral welfare.” The bill has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee. Continue Reading →

There are several states in the United States that have “community property” laws. In these states, generally, all property acquired during a marriage is the “community property” of the marriage. This doesn’t actually mean much legally unless a couple gets divorced and property must be divided.

Federal copyright law gives the creator legal rights in their creation. States with community property laws (this chart lists those states) have had to decide whether the author’s copyright under federal law means that person retains an individual ownership right in their creations or whether material created during a marriage leads to the copyright being “community property.”

In California, as Carol Lay discovered, upon getting a divorce, community property law trumps federal copyright law. In Louisiana community property also trumps but there is a more nuanced approach. A recent case, Rodrigue v. Rodrigue, held that:

The author-spouse in whom copyright vests maintains exclusive managerial control of copyright but, under Louisiana law, economic benefits of copyrighted work belong to the community while it exists and to former spouses in indivision thereafter.

See this article for more discusion of this decision. Each state with community property laws will have its own jurisprudence on how this issue is resolved. Continue Reading →

Scott Kurtz picked up on this Heidi McDonald column over at the Pulse. Apparently Tony “Maakies” Millionaire said he was being harassed by several state attorneys general and the US Department of Justice. Millionaire explained:

One of the editors told me that it was from the Attorney General’s office in the state in which the paper runs. He said he called and a woman on the phone told him that this was coming down all over from the Federal Attorney General, from Ashcroft’s office. They’re issuing warning letters to state Attorney General’s offices who are cleaning up throughout their individual states. My guess is that these people consider the funny pages a safe haven for kids and that’s why they’ll come down harder on comics than on other print media.

Really who knows? Prosecutors have harassed people for stranger things. But some folks seem to have confused this with the Federal Communications Commisson (FCC). The FCC (unfortunately) is empowered to censor broadcast radio and television. That’s it. The FCC does not concern itself with content on the Internet (or any part of the telecommunications system for that matter). So rest assured – the FCC may be busting Janet Jackson over her naked bust on television but the FCC won’t bat an eye over your online comic of the same. Continue Reading →