DCM and Public Libraries, Check it out!!!

[bminor]

I have a project in mind that I would think be great to give to my public library.
I would like to burn some cd's of some of DCM's collection and offer this to our library so that the young people of today could enjoy the public domain comics out there.
I would think that the Fawcett heros, Captain Marvel especially, would be great for kids to encourage reading.
Is there any permissions that I would have to receive from the DCM community before embarking on such a quest?
I would offer this to my library free of charge.
(I also want to do the same with a bunch of PD old time radio shows also).
I just did a Google search for DCM and you would be surprised at the number of libraries, quite a lot of them, have blurbs about the public domain comics available to read at DCM!!!

B.

[Yoc]

Hi B,
Nice of you to ask.
But technically, the books are in the pd and what is done with them is beyond anyone's control.
If someone wants to sell them on eBay (and they do) we can't stop them.
If you want to make a dvd to give to a friend or the library, we can't say yes or no.
I've always believed the scans themselves don't 'belong' to DCM.  If anyone can lay claim to ownership it's the scanner's themselves.  And as a sometime scanner myself, once a scan is released to the world there really is no way to control what becomes of it IMO.  To say 'that's mine, you can or can't have it' seems silly.  But that's just my opinion.

GL,
-Yoc

[Roygbiv666]

Hi B,
Nice of you to ask.
But technically, the books are in the pd and what is done with them is beyond anyone's control.
If someone wants to sell them on eBay (and they do) we can't stop them.
If you want to make a dvd to give to a friend or the library, we can't say yes or no.
I've always believed the scans themselves don't 'belong' to DCM.  If anyone can lay claim to ownership it's the scanner's themselves.  And as a sometime scanner myself, once a scan is released to the world there really is no way to control what becomes of it IMO.  To say 'that's mine, you can or can't have it' seems silly.  But that's just my opinion.

GL,
-Yoc

But the polite thing would be to credit the community of scanners who made them possible?

This sounds interesting - is there any value in approaching libraries in general? Not to be a Debbie Downer, but would libraries simply take someone's word for it that they are PD?

[John C]

A stupid point worth mentioning:  Since libraries are government funded, you may need to be careful about what you give them for consumption by children.  For example, since you bring up Captain Marvel, there are some...unfortunate incidents (Whiz Comics #12, say).  And...well, there's Steamboat.  And Captain Nippon.

I mean, I'd be perfectly happy letting kids read such things, because I don't think any reasonable child would look at it and say, "oh, well, I should go ask my Asian friends when they fixed their buck teeth."  But one activist teen stumbles across it, and you're run out of town on a rail.

(As for copyrights, libraries are allowed to carry things that are copyrighted.  They're even allowed to make scans of copyrighted works available provided that the intent is for viewing and it'd be otherwise difficult to acquire a physical copy.  The rule is usually meant for replacement/preservation purposes, where the library does own a copy, but I don't think it's exclusive.  Besides, it's the government, which technically has a license to all Intellectual Property in exchange for granting you those rights, though I don't believe any administration has ever leveraged that detail.)

[Yoc]

John makes a good point.  (as always, )
If they take them they might even say these are for teens+.
I wouldn't be in a hurry to five them the precode horror titles.  Well, not the nasty stuff anyways.

If you do offer them anything, let us know how it goes B.  I'd be interested to know what they do/say.

-Yoc

[josemas]

John makes a good point.  (as always, )
If they take them they might even say these are for teens+.
I wouldn't be in a hurry to five them the precode horror titles.  Well, not the nasty stuff anyways.

If you do offer them anything, let us know how it goes B.  I'd be interested to know what they do/say.

-Yoc

The teen section of our local public library stocks plenty of graphic novels and collections.  Some of them, such as the Vertigo titles and The Walking Dead are more graphic and touch on more adult topics than most anything you're liable to find among among precode comics on this site.

Of course that probably varies from community to community so you might want to check things out with your local library to see what they might want (or not want).

Best

Joe

[darkmark (RIP)]

I know how that goes.  A couple of issues of Sandman were so gross that I trashed them and refused to read the series for a long time.