Digital Comic Museum
DCM Download Site => What you can upload => Topic started by: freddyfly on September 17, 2012, 12:46:57 AM
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Hi,
Anybody know if we can upload United Features' Sparkler Comics, specifically Sparkman, and Broncho Bill(see Standard Comics)? How about Race Riley & Hap Hopper?
Otherwise, the comics are the usual collection of Sunday comics: Tarzan, Abbie&Slats, Ella Cinders, Captain & Kids, L'il Abner, Nancy, and in later issues, Casey Ruggles.
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Sorry Len.
Nothing by United Features is allowed on the site.
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I should have added that I was hoping you'd allow some parts of Sparklers because you do have one on site:
Small Publishers > Sparkler 001- Jim Hardy issue
You also have one in the suspect/non-PD folder: Sparkman #1. Can I up some to that folder?
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I think Sparkman should be fine and I would love to see more of him
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Len,
I suggest uploading them to CB+ if they allow them.
The Suspect folder is non-public. Sparkler 1 Jim Hardy slipped by us. It will be placed there.
United Features is not allowed on the site.
Sorry.
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Where Sparkman and Jim Hardy ever renewed? I think they may have faded away out of memory and never renewed. Anyone want to check?
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This is a case where it's easiest for all involved on DCM to say nothing from United Narf.
John has a FAQ on checking PD status that tells people how to check status on their own.
With newspaper strips it's even more complicated!
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I am gathering up Sparkman, Triple Terror, and Mirror Man stories for an anthology or archive over at CB+ anyone want to help me? Those stories cannot and will not be posted here. Email me off-board if interested.
RB
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where do you find comic strip renewals? Neither Sparkman or Sparler show up as renewed. I do not know where the list is for strip renewals.
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Heh, heh. A list. How cute.
No, they're "contributions to periodicals," Jim. So, basically, every single strip is listed alphabetically by whoever registered the copyright at the time of renewal. Maybe a pointer from the original copyright holder, if the Copyright clerk was awake that day. Then you get to scour day by day.
And I can't find information either way, and I assume that it's not the case because it'd be insane, but it's a plausible interpretation that a strip (especially with local circulation) that didn't get copyrighted properly might be covered by the newspaper's copyright.
It's icky, basically. Personally, I'd rather try to figure it out through tea leaves.
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Which is why I think the obscure ones are going to be pretty safe. So I figure we will carry them at CB+
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Oh, I forgot to mention that strips in comic books are usually going to be reprints, whereas the renewal would be for the original publication.
Also, just my personal opinion, but ignoring trademarks, I'd much rather tangle with a major property than an obscure one. If Disney or Time-Warner gets bent out of shape, they'll send a polite Cease and Desist asking you to remove the property. Small property can mean weirdos who are less interested in what their rights actually are and resolving a problem than in punishing people who they think wronged them.
It's more of a guideline than a rule, and history doesn't make the future, but you'll notice you don't hear about big-name lawsuits over copyright infringement, whereas you do have people like the late John Carbonaro, who routinely try to drag down anybody who so much as mentioned the THUNDER Agents, which is clearly at least 90% in the public domain.
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I'm with Narf. I think that CB+ is a better place to test this sort of thing out at. Besides if there are some small minded persons out there that think these PD or not (and they should be PD) obscure characters who are not reprint strips, belong to them, should they not be able to prove it first before persecuting someone for what is perceived as a violation? Otherwise what is the point? What are these people protecting to begin with? When was the last time we saw a Triple Terror story, or a Mirrorman story. Or a better point...... a Black Crusader and/or a Red Knight? Would S & S really go to war over these two characters? I wonder....but again.....CB+ is the place to experiment with this idea for USF characters for now. Just my 2 cents.
Again.....anyone who has any of these obscure character stories from USF, Sparkman, Mirrorman, and the Triple Terror and want to contribute, please email me offline. Thank you and end of rant.
Mr Goldenage.
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The owners of Street & Smith have shown they don't fool around.
I agree if CB+ are willing that is the best place for these.
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Besides if there are some small minded persons out there that think these PD or not (and they should be PD) obscure characters who are not reprint strips, belong to them, should they not be able to prove it first before persecuting someone for what is perceived as a violation?
That's sort of my point, though. As far as I know, people complain when it happens that the little guy is getting crushed, but this is how a company like Disney is likely to work. They want to do things by the books and in good faith (that you've made a mistake), so that IF they need to go to court, they're definitely the wronged party.
A trust fund baby who "bought the rights," even if they're not in the right? They could file frivolous lawsuits and name everybody you do business with as a defendant. A web host or payment processor has surprisingly little interest in keeping you as a customer if it causes them the least bit of trouble, which shuts you down fast.
If it doesn't, they can drag out the case to force you to spend money on lawyers. To my knowledge, this hasn't happened with "real" copyright cases, but it has certainly happened with the RIAA for kids downloading music. They hold the statutory infringement of $150,000 per song (three times that, if they prove you know or didn't care it was copyright infringement) over their heads, subpoena their bank records, and demand a settlement of whatever the kid has in their accounts or threaten dragging the case out forever, even if they have no evidence. (Pornography shops have been doing the same thing with movies, with the added twist of making the case a public spectacle to drag your name through the mud.)
I'm not making a recommendation here, by any means. I'm certainly not a lawyer and I'm not anybody's father (is it still compulsory to say "that I know of," like "comedy" in the '90s?), so take that for nothing more than the framework I use to make these decisions. From what I've seen, Conde Nast (who owns the Street and Smith properties, if that's what we're talking about) is willing to play nice, but show them that you're not, and they'll rip you apart.
Keep in mind that copyright is about choosing who can publish (even if Hollywood wants to make it about who can have access, it's still about publication), and that includes suppressing circulation if they don't want something in the public eye. To give a probably-worthless hypothetical example, an artist's kid who inherited copyrights might refuse to let anybody publish it for thnking that was the work that destroyed their family, say.
And right now, they have that right, as long as they got the copyright statement right (automatic after 1988, for the most part) and filed a renewal (automatic after 1991, for books published after 1963), whether or not we agree. Personally, I take the opposite view. Works that are "culturally important" or even merely popular shouldn't be covered under copyright for so long, because they shouold be available to as wide an audience as possible--if there's a da Vinci working today, copyrights will prevent his work from being advanced by anybody but the rich. Plus, doing that would allow the obscure stuff to shine at the big companies, instead of watching them rely on yet one more rehash of something we've all seen before.
But that's just me.
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I am glad to see that this turned into an interesting conversation. Actually this is about UFS over @ CB+. I for one would not dare to upload anything here by S&S that is owned by Conde Nast ( bought them out in 1953?) or over @ CB+ even because that is the rule and I obey the rule. I have just emailed Conde Nast about "showcasing" their comic work of the 1940's on one of my yahoo groups with their permission a few days ago, but of course I have not heard back from them. Go figure. JohnC makes several good points and some I even agree with even though I think the "law" is flawed in some of these cases. Just my own personal opinion. I have no interest in making money off of these books. I just want to save them. That is all. Plain and simple. Anyways a great conversation. Thanks!
RB
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Oh, the law is extremely flawed. As it stands, it allows big corporate ownership to determine what we're allowed to read (and watch and listen to) while providing very little protection if, for example, Disney integrates a bunch of fan fiction into their upcoming Star Wars movies without asking permission; the authors would have the right to sue, but it requires a lot of money to push through to the end.
(That's really what "Orphan Works" laws are about, when you see big names supporting them. They don't want you or I preserving some obscure book that only has a few copies remaining. They want to avoid paying you for your work because, "hey, we couldn't find you, so you must not have cared.")
Intellectual Property has also mutated (or reverted--prior to Queen Anne, publishers believed they had a perpetual monopoly and her copyright law acknowledged the monopoly but put a strict limit on it) from an acceptable-loss approach to "promoting progress" to a philosophy that artists (or, rather, the multinational corporations that employ them) somehow "deserve" to make a profit from their efforts at the expense of society, despite any poor business practices.
So, I don't support how it works, but I also don't think that it would serve anyone to bankrupt the people willing to fight against it and give the publishers examples to pitch for why they "need" even stricter laws.
On the activism front, though, it's worth pointing out that the International Telecommunication Union is meeting on December 3rd to propose a treaty they've been keeping secret, but leaked chapters show that they're trying to give themselves the same authority over the Internet that they have over telephone lines, like authorizing "kill switches" on national networks. Expect to see a lot of sites showing the "Cat Signal" (of the Internet Defense League) this week to highlight that.
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I had not heard anyone big was fighting for "orphan works" laws. While I may not agree with their reason for doing it, I hope some orphan laws can be passed. That would make things like Sparkman and Triple Terror even more safe. I do believe them to be very safe.
I tried to contact S&S awhile back with no response. I even tried to go through someone who was asking for assistance. They may want help but sure do not want to give it.
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Unfortunately, the proposal I know that made it the furthest basically put a cap on infringement awards based (inversely, I guess) on a "reasonably diligent effort" to find the copyright holder beforehand. That might sound nice, but "reasonable" is left open to interpretation based on the nature of the work and the identity of the copyright holder.
In other words, the New York Times can't be bothered to find out who posted a picture to the Internet, so your award is nominal at best, but you'd be bankrupted for not getting a month-long research project right, if a big company is at the end of the tunnel.
To me, the only real solution is to get rid of "orphans" as a concept, since gray areas don't "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," or really anything. I like what we do with Registered Trademarks and even corporations: You pay a frequent periodic fee to keep your registration. That solves the "diligent effort" by providing a contact every couple of years and encourages creators to "donate" anything that isn't making them money. (Of course, that also encourages creators to sell their rights to companies that'll renew everything and anything as a cost of doing business, which is unfortunate.)
As to getting a response, of course there's no response. They're not traditionally in the business of permission, which means that granting permission means having a lawyer draft a license, which costs them money. There's also probably at least one manager to whom anybody you contact would have to explain the concrete economic benefits of allowing anybody to read for free what they could conceivably charge for. It's not like borrowing a shovel from a neighbor. It's more like borrowing a shovel (or one of those orange aprons, maybe) from Home Depot.
If I were trying to get anywhere, I'd probably try to go through the people who deal with copyrights directly, the lawyers. Recruit the people who'd get paid to draft the license to find the people who'll pay them to do it. Their names would presumably be on the Blackmask case about the unauthorized Doc Savage reprints. And the more official you can look (paper letter, letterhead), the further you'll probably get.
An alternative would be something like a VP (or whatever) of Business Development. They usually have the ear of the decision-makers and have some authority to create loss-leaders if they can pitch it as something that'll help the company in the long term. Sounds like a fake title you give to politically-connected kids, I know, but a good one sees the big picture and has the power to act, or at least the influence to get people to act.
It's still no guarantee, since Conde Nast is an old, traditional company from a time when you clamp down on Intellectual Property because it has the word "property" in the name, and you wouldn't give away acres of land, but I think it'd be a better place to start than anybody tied to the publishing side of things.
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Our wonderful government puts everyone at odds with everyone else. With laws based on the death of a creator rather than on a registered timeline like trademark. The government makes laws making business powerful over people and other legislation making lawyers able to sue business for other business or the government costing billions. I am wanting to write a cartoon book entitled "Only a Politician...."
much of it dealing with education. An example being "Only a politician would think that every child should take Algebra in ninth grade even though have failed math for the previous eight grades."
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Not to get too political, myself, but unfortunately, that's a direct result of the people who most tout "freedom" in their policies. What they mean is freedom for large corporations. Big business can do whatever they want. Raise your kids to their precise specifications, though, or they'll hand the buggers over to the Commies (who merely think that kids shouldn't be raised by parents, lest they develop ideologies that run contrary to whatever war needs to happen to raise corporate profits).
Hm. That's actually way too political. Oops.
The problem is that people aren't as organized as they used to be. When I was a kid, parents went to town council meetings and dogged their state and national representatives when something was wrong. Now, we wait for some NGO drone to wander by with a petition, as if a signature actually changes the world.
Then things don't change, so people are frustrated with "government," and actively refuse to get involved. But if people like you and me aren't screaming at our Congressmen, who's left for them to listen to...? It's sort of a parallel to the gun control line: When engaging with the government is crooked, only crooked people get represented.
Change requires two things, at this point, barring the North Korean missile being carried on Qilin-back to Washington and wiping everybody out, which would probably change the rules a bit. First, you need staffers who are interested, because they advise on policy and probably have more sway than the representatives do, on the long run. Second, you need the cost-benefit case that outweighs Hollywood claiming that it loses half a million jobs per year due to piracy despite only having a few hundred thousand jobs total. It needs to be an emotional enough story to get attention, but not so emotional that it's irrational.
My angle is probably too dry: Connecting people has an exponential return on investment, which is a great case for municipal (or even Federal) Internet access, where tax revenues tend to jump about ten percent; against censorship, as publishers worry about what to invest in and citizens make decisions on poor information; and against strong Intellectual Property law, as the raw materials of storytelling and technology get gobbled up by people who are invested against seeing the next developments happen.
As for the algebra thing...I don't know. I think it's possible to teach algebra to someone who can barely count, since the concepts don't rely on numerical calculation. Most of the examples I can think of are more calculus than algebra (like the best place for a lazy dog to catch a thrown ball, qualitatively, or how much time it'd take to fill up a weirdly-shaped fish tank), but it's feasible. However, you definitely can't teach the topics by the standard syllabus. In fact, every approach to algebra I can think of that doesn't rely on arithmetic is sort of...instructor-averse, like graphing methods.
No, wait. Actually, during the brief window when I was taught math (post-"New Math," pre-"New New Math," I believe was how they put it to my parents), it was through modular (or "clock," to kids our age) arithmetic. And that actually is algebra used as the tool to teach arithmetic, where 472 is 4x10x10 + 7x10 + 2, and you get multivariable "equations" by moving to something like time. (That was a relatively poor public school, by the way, nothing fancy.)
Or maybe that was the tail end of New Math, since it's basically how the Tom Lehrer song goes. Again, though, teach like that, and the administrators push you out to sea on a burning boat, because "that''s not how things are done" anymore.
But I also think that math is covered to abstractly, and the rise of the "word problem" has backfired into contorted ideas that make even less sense to the kids who didn't understand the original idea. I've yet to see a kid older than maybe four who can't add (or know to count up) but can suddenly do that when you instead ask how many apples or whatnot they have. I'd much rather the problems be real, ideally connected with people, like making a shopping list from a handful of recipes (and doing so for a restaurant, where each recipe is used a bunch of times, for bigger kids).
To me, math is like reading. You need to know how to do it, but it's not really a topic that's separate from the rest of the curriculum unless you want to make it hard...and that's actually the goal, for a lot of programs--they're designed to feed into PhD programs, not society.
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Another cartoon would be "Only a politician's appointed judge could rule bribery as free speech. Everyone knows that campaign contributions are legalized bribery not free speech." Yes I realize this discussion has become very political but no party lines. I think we all agree the system is terribly broken.
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Going further off-topic, but the Citizens United decision is actually worth a read, if you have the patience, because it shows that the Justices don't believe this should be our situation despite their ruling. It's basically an argument that the Supreme Court only judges Constitutionality, not abuse or utility of a law.
Mind you, I disagree with them on two points. First, they're only limited to Constitutionality because there's an irrational terror of being branded an "activist judge," as if they ever need to look for another job again. Second, whether or not corporations are people, they ain't citizens, and we gleefully restrict campaign contributions by non-citizens. But to the extent you believe their premises, they're right that blocking some contributions opens the door to block others.
(There may be an argument that, bribery happening anyway, at least making it legal makes it trackable. Not too long ago, I was told a story that local politicians used to hire young boys to go to parties for the purpose of dancing with girls at the party. The girls--which sounds like a completely different kind of creepy--were hired by the donors who had passed their contribution limits, and would slip office supplies and stamps in particular, into the boys' jacket pockets while they danced. Kinda-sorta clever, I guess. Harder to trace than cash.)
However, this (and the Obamacare "the penalty must be a tax" ruling) highlights one of the few major flaws in the Constitution: The Supreme Court should probably be allowed to demand that Congress convene immediately to fix really or unclear terrible laws.
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As if congress can do anything these days. Sad state of affairs I am sorry to say. I is a shame what is happening in DC this last decade or so. No one is innocent. They are the problem with no solution to offer other than more of the same. Just my 2 cents less.
RB
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Given how SOPA panned out and how the reaction that the ITU meeting is getting in Washington, I think they just need better guidance. When we all speak, they do listen fairly well.
The problem, I imagine, is that we scream irrationally (as far as they can tell), whereas lobbyists buy them dinner. Who would you listen to...?
They're still running scared because transparency iis overtaking them and they don't know what to do where the sun does shine, but that'll shake itself out. Eventually, they'll pick up that any random Wikipedia talk page (my new obsession) bridges much bigger philosophical gaps than they have to come to an agreement politely far faster than any legislature ever has (when the threat of death wasn't hanging over their heads).
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John, you almost might as well split this off into it's own topic no?
Just thinking here.
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I think that's probably the end of it. Best not attract shouting under its own title...