TCJ has an interesting article up examining R. Crumb’s copyright suit against Amazon.com for an image Amazon used on its 404 page (File Not Found). The image, although not the Crumb original, is somewhat like Crumb’s "Keep On Truckin’" man image. Besides outlining that case, the article delves into some of the changes to copyright law in our lifetime.
More newsy stuff after the jump:
In other copyright news, BoingBOING blogs about the comic book Bound by Law, a comic from the Duke Center for the Public Domain that brilliantly explains "how copyright — which is supposed to promote creativity — can get in the way of creation".
In talking-about-webcomics news, Eric Burns posts his manifesto for good webcomics criticism which does have some good common sense stuff in it, but also has advice that would seemingly only be necessary to give to delusional and somewhat narcissistic folks. Let me give you my version of what I think Eric is trying to say (and is also based on my own experience from writing about webcomics for almost a half-decade):
The world at large only gives a tiny bit of fame and even less fortune to webcomics. And guess what? 99% of that is showered on actual working creators of webcomics (as it should be). That last 1%? Not worth being a bad human being to acquire (and so far I’ve seen no evidence of that strategy working for anyone either).
And in comic book news, a nice article about Howard Chaykin’s return to comics. Chaykin’s The Shadow is still one of my favorite all-time comic books.
Also a comic book direct market distributor called FM International went out of business. Ninth Art examines the fallout. TCJ also has a piece online about the story.
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