This was just brought to my attention from a friend. Apparently, there is some legislation concerning orphaned works. Naturally, one must take this with a grain of salt, as this seems very scary for creators everywhere.

The creator of the manga-style webcomic Shonen Punk is accusing a small-press webmanga repackager of re-publishing his work without acquiring permission, or providing compensation.

From the creator's LiveJournal:

February Update Hello web denizens, Genericon was a blast as always and I bid the new people on this list a friendly welcome. I was invited to attend Katsucon in the middle of February, which will be a fun chance to check out this con. You can find me in Artist’s Alley. I started a new shop on printfection.com all about politics.

The current copyright system is the subject of intense debate among creators, consumers, technology companies and corporate copyright holders. Here's an interesting article on the subject from Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Publishing that makes the excellent point that the current system is tilted to the few have-a-lots and that "obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy." There are also reports that at least one of the major record corporations is considering releasing music unrestricted in the MP3 format.

Considering that webcomics are essentially the comics-equivalent of unrestricted MP3 files, I suppose comics are a little bit ahead of the curve here. Although comic book companies have not jumped in with both feet, newspaper syndicates largely have and many major creators have already embraced the obscurity is worse than free perspective of O'Reilly.

I'm going to use this post as an excuse to link to a great roundtable interview on comics and copyright that Comixpedia previously published in 2005. Still very relevant if you missed it the first time.

UPDATE 2: It's gone.

Update: An earlier version of this post linked to an "about me" page for a Scott Dial. The webcomic discussed in the post is claimed by Steve Dial, not Scott Dial.

Dr.Sebetos also noted that Jeff Rowland commented in the Fleen post on this.

Fleen points out one of the more blatant and strange examples of plagerism I've ever seen in webcomics. This "webcomic" appears to be word for word copies of Overcompensating strips. It's redrawn, but it looks like the "artist" is drawing it as much like the original OC strips as his "talent" allows.

I'm totally flabbergasted by this. This guy describes himself as a senior in college applying for PhD programs in Computer Science. Either this is an elaborate hoax perpetuted by Jeff Rowland and/or the Dumbrella crew or this other guy is actually in a lot of potential trouble. Even a first year law student barely getting C's could win the copyright infringement case Jeff Rowland could bring against this guy.

A Goats post about chasing down a copycat t-shirt salesman actually raises an interesting legal question which is: how much copyright protection do you actually get for a parody, especially one that incorporates material that is copyrighted or trademarked by someone else.