Digital Comic Museum

Digital Comic Museum => News and Announcements => Topic started by: Yoc on July 31, 2012, 09:48:12 AM

Title: Terry and The Pirates/Joe Palooka status change
Post by: Yoc on July 31, 2012, 09:48:12 AM
 :-[
Hi gang,
Due to the very questionable PD status of the Terry and The Pirates/Joe Palooka newspaper strips the staff of DCM have decided it best to no long share their folders in the Classic Newspaper Strips sections.
We do think their comics shared in the Charlton and Harvey sections should be fine so those will remain unless we learn otherwise.

We're sorry if this upsets anyone but we do want to be on the safe side of this matter.

-Yoc
Title: Re: Terry and The Pirates/Joe Palooka status change
Post by: John C on July 31, 2012, 04:18:47 PM
To clarify, in case anybody wants to pursue this...

Comic strips aren't periodicals.  Researching the copyrights requires going in for each strip (yes, one entry for, like, three panels), sorted by owner rather than title (maybe the publisher, writer, artists, or some random guy), and not always labeled clearly in the renewals.

The ownership issue was also troublesome, because the scans of the strips weren't clear enough to read, making it impossible for us to guess what to look up.

Lastly, most strips eventually ended up in the hands of the syndicate that distributed them to papers, and whereas comic book companies were generally fly-by-night enough to not care about or understand (depending on the company) copyrights, national companies that dealt with newspapers generally did.  There are exceptions to this, but the way to bet is that comic strips got things right, from the few checks I've made, over the years.

If we eventually end up with waaay too much free time on our hands for research and can get clearer shots of those copyright statements, we might try to clear them, and (as mentioned above) anybody wanting to dig in would be appreciated.  But as it stands, it's "needle in a haystack" territory, with too many unknowns and no evidence or memory that the copyrights were ever checked.  And since not many people come here for the comic strips, it doesn't seem like a troublesome decision.