Copyrights and Wrongs, Part 2
Welcome back!
As promised last week, once again we're going to be talking about copyright! I also gave some homework at the end of that. If you haven't yet submitted to the Copyright Office's study on generative AI, I still very much recommend doing that before October 18th. Because they are the copyright office, they are specifically interested in how generative AI in regards to copyright--how it's already affecting copyright, how it could affect copyright, if there's anything they can do to enforce copyright on it--and if you are an artist or creator or concerned citizen of any sort, you should still submit a public comment even if you don't feel you have the firmest grasp of the legal specifics as long as you can articulate why you feel it's bad for you, your profession, or your interests.
I also asked that you read about Bill Willingham "releasing Fables" into the public domain. I said it then, will say it again, that dude sucks. I don't want to dwell on him or the specifics of Fables particularly, but I do want to talk about the gesture, the response from DC, and the parts of this that just happened to be a very illustrative example at a time when I wanted to talk about copyright anyway! So, let's get into it!
DC's Response
If somehow missed it, the very short recap is the writer/creator of Fables posted a newsletter on his Sus-stack (burn!) outlining how DC had done wrong by him and the book and so now he is making it a part of the public domain. DC still has exclusive rights on the original series and all publishing around that, and in a move of mutually assured destruction (?), he can't do new Fables without DC and DC can't do new Fables without him, but theoretically he was granting everyone else the right to create new material in any medium of their choosing.
If you kept an eye on that at all--a whole news cycle sure did happen in a week--it was fresh as of my last posting and I think later that very day DC issued a response that was about what most people expected. It was, concisely, "no, it isn't public domain. DC asserts our rights and this doesn't actually change things." And now that battle will likely be fought primarily behind closed doors after a very public bout.
Again, I am not an expert about copyright, so while I am sharing what I can and trying to provide information that should be useful, I don't have direct access to the copyright filings or the knowledge of how to read them to prove definitively how the rights have been transfered and assigned. What I can say is if you read a volume of Fables, sure looks to me like it says in the copyright line "(c) Bill Willingham and DC Comics." And regardless of how you feel about corporate comics entities like DC flexing their powers on claims on things that might be creator-owned, suffice to say, whatever lawyer they had review the statement they drafted and released sure thinks they have copyright claim to it.
Let's talk about why in particular they might think that and one of the unique peculiarities of copyright: work for hire.
Work for Hire
I talked a little bit last time about the idea of work for hire. The short and sweet of it is that you can be hired to work on something that you don't own the copyright to and, in exchange for money, any copyright that you would theoretically have under other circumstances of creation are assigned to the original rights holder. If you want to work on Sonic, you're going to have to sign paperwork that says "yes, I understand that SEGA owns Sonic and therefore SEGA owns the work I create for Sonic." Simple.
Fables is a work for hire for contributors other than Bill Willingham. The artists and colorists and letterers all signed that paperwork assigning their rights to the copyright owner when working on it. But, specifically, they assigned their rights to DC. Again, not a legal expert, but seemingly, DC did not then fully assign those rights to Willingham. He gets the words, they get the art, and as long as they're harmonious, everything's groovy. One of the really bummer things about this whole situation is that while there were a number of artists who worked on the series, they don't really get any say in the conversation.
Work for hire is obviously very common when you're working on something that has a clearly established history--like Sonic or Batman--but can get a lot more complicated quickly when you're talking about something new. Again, not knowing fully about the development of this specific book, but speaking generally, I assume it was pitched without an artist attached. Comics get pitched without artists a fair amount (less so pitched without writers, but it happens). And so, a situation can develop like this where a writer is contractually given copyright, but since they're only negotiating for themself and the artist is hired by the company, you start out with it being work for hire for a number of the creators. When books come in and are created by a cartoonist or are coming in with a team already together, often those negotiations are with all creators maintaining copyright.
But even that can get complicated. I have worked on creator-owned books where the original authors maintain the copyright and license it to a company to release for a period of time, and the company then helps them secure variant covers, and the variant covers are the only part of the book that're created via work for hire. But if you are a creator, it's important to track these things because at some point, you need to know who actually owns that work--whether it's when figuring out a contract with a publisher or when looking for some rights permission down the line or whatever.
Thinking of a couple of examples of where this stuff gets weird and where copyright and ownership get tricky, I'm going to talk very briefly about licensing and about Watchmen.
Licensing: Something I have seen creators be caught off-guard by when it comes to doing work for hire is that because you are giving up your copyright, you are giving up modification rights and licensing rights. Essentially, if the company wants to put your art on a t-shirt and you signed the agreement, they can without paying your extra or crediting you in any way. Related to that issue of crediting, they can remove your signature if they want. Or keep the lineart but change the colors. Because they ultimately own the art. This is something that happens more prominently to artists than writers because visuals are easier to use in other mediums and to sell merchandise rights for, but it can happen to anyone.
One of the things that I think really catches people off-guard about this too is depending on the publisher, they might not be the rights holder. Again, to use the example of Sonic because it's a really easy one--SEGA owns Sonic and all material created for it. A company like IDW is as much a licensee as the people who make the toys or the apparel or whatever. So, if the rights are assigned to SEGA, they can do what they want and they don't have to tell either the artists or IDW and can license what they want. So, if you've ever seen an artist surprised to find their work out in the wild on something else, there's a chance that there're so many levels of separation between them creating the art and the person who licensed it out that there's no real way to easily communicate it back out the artist and let them know. Which some folks take issue with and y'know is one of the complicated things you need to consider when working on other people's properties.
Watchmen: So, this is one of those things that I'd have to talk about here sometime and this seems as good a time as any. This is one of those famous stories that goes around comics circles and, let me say up front, while I have opinions, again, I haven't seen the paperwork. I'm not a legal expert. This is just the story as it has been shared. The word on the street is that the contract for Watchmen was written in such a way that the rights would revert back to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons after DC no longer had the book in print. And as of yet, Watchmen has never been out of print and the rights have never not been with DC. Again, copyright law is weird and I have never seen these contracts and can't speak to the validity of any claims, but I will say, there is prescident for the assignment of publishing rights to be tied to a certain time period--again, that's kind of how this stuff regularly works. A team creates a comic concept, takes it to a publisher, the publisher licenses the rights for a contractual period of time, and when that term expires given the contract, full rights revert back to the creators to do with what they will. That's why, occasionally, you see creator-owned books move publishers like Usagi Yojimbo has a few times.
Last bit about WFH (work for hire, not work from home or Godzilla: War for Humanity), things do get kinda wacky internationally. Generally, copyright law is going to apply to the country of ownership and/or creation first. So, like, to the Batman example, because DC is owned in the US, Batman copyright is subject to the US laws, even if the creators working on it are doing work for hire from countries with different copyright laws. Things can get complex when you're dealing with stuff across international borders, but wanted to make note that generally the country of ownership/first publication/creation takes precident in copyright for work for hire.
Fables, Really?
Okay, so I do have to poke a little fun. As I think is probably very clear now, copyright law is complicated as heck! And while I'm not a legal expert, I do kind of think that the closest example to this declaration I can think of is when Michael Scott on the Office is having financial troubles and he just walks into the main room and yells "I DECLARE BANKRUPTCY!" Like, it's kind of following the idea of what needs to happen, but might not actually do anything as a result of not happening through the proper channels and might just be yelling into a room.
As a technical matter, yes, you should be able to vacate your copyright and put your works into the public domain. However, that's not really how it works in practical terms. You can terminate a grant or transfer of rights under very specific conditions--there may be a way for Willingham and DC to part ways on the copyright. And you can dedicate a work to the public domain--in the creation of the work, you can say it's for the public domain--which essentially comes down to the decision to enforce more than anything else. But a lot of places, simply, don't have a mechanism to totally forfeit an author's rights to allow it to enter the public domain.
And, just to have this said, the issue at hand was all about the encouragement of new material. If you put a work in the public domain--if you legally can do that--it's kind of an all-or-nothing thing. You can't keep the copyright on the stuff you already did and just say anything moving forward or other people's uses of the work are public domain. Like, to the basis of DC's claims, if nothing else, contractually rights are assigned such that he'd only be able to do it at DC and he and no one else can fully reproduce what has already been made, then it isn't actually public domain.
What he's kind of looking to do is something closer to a Creative Commons license. The sort of very short version is the Creative Commons is an organization of folks who do understand copyright law better than me and have organized a way of providing licenses--the paperwork of releasing a copyright in some way--that meet specific provisions for what works can be legally made without violating the copyright. What he's closer to describing is a CC-By or a CC0, a way of saying "yeah, I still have the copyright, but I freely give the license out to anyone who wants it, only asking for credit (or no rights reserved".
As a very quick aside, one thing that artists might get out of the CC is it is a great tool for reference and--in specific circumstances--even adding art you don't want to/aren't comfortable drawing. A lot of photographers and 3D modelers and other visual artists have certain works added to a creative commons license that you could use for things like making thumbnails or getting models down to sketch from to potentially using as backgrounds in a comic to just having other people's art in a gallery if you have a scene set at a museum or something. It's a pretty rad tool to familiarize yourself with, much like things that are actually public domain.
Which brings us back to the other "really?" part of making Fables "public domain". If you're not familiar with the series, the whole thing is predicated on it BEING PUBLIC DOMAIN CHARACTERS. Like, major main cast members (at least, early on) were Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf (Bigby), Blackbeard, Rose Red, the 3 Little Pigs, Little Boy Blue, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, etc. A lot of the same folks you might see in a Disney animated feature or in the Shrek movie franchise or in a storybook or in a NSFW sapphic vampire Snow White vs. the Beast to save Beauty comic.
Now, to be fair, this is one of those things where again, the idea of public domain and copyright is complicated. Basically, Fables is predicated on an open toolbox. You can play with the cast and some of the conceptual ideas already because they are in the public domain. But, and this is one of those things that's really interesting, if you create a derivative work from something in the public domain, you then own the copyright to that version, right? Disney doesn't own Snow White as an idea, Disney owns Disney's Snow White who looks like how she's depicted in the film and who is friends with 7 dwarves named Doc, Happy, Dopey, Sneezy, Bashful, Grumpy, and... the other one and has a wicked stepmother who is an evil queen/old witch sometimes known as Grimhilde. It is the visual and specific elements of this version of the story, but the story itself is free to use. So, when it comes to a book like this, y'know, the value really comes from the theoretical ability to adapt the work into new mediums and create derivative works of this specific story, but a lot of the elements were as free for you to use as they were in the first place.
Teaser
Mini-schedule for a few more posts. Next week: we're still talking copyright. We're going to get to the differences between held and registered copyright, copyright vs. trademark vs. patent, and a bit on fan works and the complicated relationship they have with comics and media at large! The following week, we'll wrap up copyright with a final discussion of "AI" and the way it's making everything more complicated. If you'd wanna hold off on submitting your comment until after that one, I totally get it, and that blog'll be up in plenty of time for ya to still register one! And in one of the subsequent weeks in mid-October, around my birthday, I've been working on a little, I dunno, half-bio, half-way to vent some of my frustrations and concerns that I'll probably be posting right around then. After that, who knows!
See ya next time!
What I enjoyed this week:
Blank Check (Podcast), Craig of the Creek (Cartoon), Honkai Star Rail (Video game), One Piece (Manga), One Piece (Live Action), Scream 2 (Movie), 500 Days of Summer (Movie), Pokemon Violet (Video game), Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Links (Video Game), Chainsaw Man (Manga), Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake (Cartoon)
New Releases this week (9/20/2023):
Nothing from me this week...
New Releases next week (9/27/2023):
Brynmore #3 (Editor)
Godzilla: The War for Humanity #2 (Editor)
Sonic the Hedgehog: Amy's 30th Anniversary Special (Editor--happy birthday Amy and Metal Sonic)!
Announcements:
Just in case, this is an announcement I will NOT be at New York ComicCon. So don't look for me there!
October is both my anniversary month and my birthday month, so between the two, from Oct 3rd to the 18th, I'm going to be having a sale of sorts! It'll probably run through my KoFi. If you send me $15, I'll send you a package of 2-3 signed comics I've worked on! They'll be blind pack grabbags, so there's a potential for some like hard-to-find covers and issues. They'll all be things I worked on, but not necessarily things I wrote and will include stuff from Sonic, Transformers, the Hasbro Universe, Godzilla, and creator-owned series (and, yes, some things I specifically wrote will probably be included too). Plus probably some extra little gifts. If you send me $25 or more, I'll send you a trade too! There'll be a couple of options, basically a family friendly pack and a grown-up pack. It'll go through those dates or as supplies last. It will be US only just because shipping internationally's very expensive right now.
There is also an alternate option! As you know because I plug it here a lot, I have a Patreon! For the whole month of October, if you subscribe at the Feature Fan ($10) tier or above, you'll get a comic grabbag with some extra goodies--mini comics and the like, plus all the benefits of my Patreon! I know financial situations change and I don't want to discourage anyone, but please do try to only subscribe at that level if you can maintain over 2 months at least because I do wanna be able to recoup my shipping costs! And, again, unfortunately, only going to be able to mail in the US.
Wanna support me otherwise? I've got a few things for sale on Ebay, my webstore, my Kofi and Patreon linked above, or you can support Becca through their shop, Patreon, itch, or by checking them out on Twitch on Wednesdays and Saturdays! Becca and their letterer pal, Duke, also put out a new freeeeeeeee short NSFW comic in Midnight Ouevres, the adult part of the Stellar Inflorescence Genshin Impact AlbeLumi zine!
Pic of the Week:
Is it Christmas, because I've got two absolute hams named Nadja and Tiansheng!
