Hearing how DC treats comics creators makes me want to boycott their future publications. Thankfully, there are publishers like Image that operate more fairly.
>But here’s the thing: No one will ever know how valuable the asset is that they threw away. Yes, they sell lots of Watchman, but how many sales did they lose from those who would have bought the book, but didn’t, out of respect for Moore? There’s no way to know, and because there’s no way to know, the loss can never show up in their balance books. How many new and wonderful projects might Alan Moore have done with DC, had they been able to keep him happy (and in this case the way to keep him happy was easy and known: simply be fair in their dealings from now on. Quit trying to cheat him)? There’s no way to know how much DC lost over the years due to something that didn’t happen.
Well we could go by antipiracy logic and take everyone who has ever bought an Alan Moore book post-DC and multiply it by what DC was charging for books. If it works for publishers it works for authors, right? /s
It's a lesson people have to learn periodically, I suppose. As noted in that FAQ, both Frank Miller and Alan Moore already went through this with them, publicly and loudly. I like his point about not knowing what was lost by poisoning those relationships. They robbed themselves of the fruits of two of the best writer/artists in comics history, at the peak of their creative ability, and robbed us of seeing what they'd have done if they'd stayed.
(Frank Miller at least did more work for DC later, but sadly not at his peak)
My previous employer (not even the employer, some HR person) tried to steal my outstanding leave payment with exactly the same sentence; this sentence is now a huge red flag for me. It comes from a position of arrogant laziness, a more accurate translation would be 'this is how I want it to be done because i can't be bothered finding out how it's actually done', which is then reflected in the rest of OP's post: they didn't even read the contract. I did end up getting my outstanding leave payment, too, but it took some threatening.
> Bill: Yes. Probably. DC has to continue paying me royalties on the books they’ve published and keep in publication, so, as long as I work hard to keep them honest each quarter, I still have some potential income from Fables.
How does it work, legally speaking? I meant that now Fables is in public domain, would DC still need to pay royalties to him? I understand that they had/have a contract, but not sure if the contract is tied to copyright implicitly or explicitly.
A contract like that covers a lot more than just the material itself: there's branding, use of the author's name and likeness, editorial rights of both parties, etc. There's no particular reason to assume it would be tied to the copyright status of the work itself, and plenty of reasons to assume it wouldn't (after all, you don't want to have to pull the author branding just because something entered the public domain over time).
His FAQ in the follow up post makes it clear he believes that he's released to the public domain every part of it that he owns. That would include all of his writing over the years.
There's certainly a lot of gray area left on the artwork, especially. DC probably owns most of it? It might take a lot of work to track down the original artists and find their thoughts on all this.
At face value based on what Willingham seems to believe, you could probably remix the early comics, use the dialog word for word, maybe even panel for panel. But you'd probably need to use entirely new artwork and be very careful that the artwork is entirely new with fresh concepts.
But there's a fun twist there given how much of Fables is itself based on older public domain works and arguments that many of the core concepts of the characters have always been public domain and even very close artwork may be entitled to some interesting fair use judgments.
(I'm not a lawyer of course, and neither is Willingham. If I had one suggestion for Willingham it might be to talk to Creative Commons lawyers and get something like the CC0 involved, including legally binding descriptions of the parts of the series that Willingham now thinks are dedicated to the public domain.)
No, it's the whole thing. Under his contract he retained ownership of all the material, and presumably nothing about his contract actually bars him from releasing it as public domain.
Reading this, and hindsight being what it is, it seems like the contracts didn't have penalty clauses for non-compliance. It's horrible to say this when you're theoretically dealing with adults, but it is as if everything needs a big stick or stungun attached to it, and a lot of NO, BAD MONKEY penalties for every "crack" they fell through. That would be hard to build a contract around.
Image has a ton great titles too. I never gave much thought to them until one day I realized how much space they take up on my shelves. Saga alone takes up a ton of that space, but other series I've enjoyed include The Wicked + The Divine, Monstress, Paper Girls, Skyward, and Injection (although I think that one has been canceled after the author was)
As someone unfamiliar with graphic novels, can you recommend some good ones that have more "adult" themes? I don't mean porn, but like storylines that are more interesting than bam bam pow pow. Maybe more like a typical novel than a comic aimed at younger readers, if that makes sense?
Transmetropolitan. Basically cross Hunter S Thompson and Futurama. The blackest of black comedies. Likely to be a love/hate kind of thing... but it's one of the books that opened my eyes to what a non-superhero comic could be.
I've only ever dabbled in caped heroes, so most (if not all) of what I listed is what you're looking for although Saga deserves special mention. I'd consider The Sandman (sadly DC) a must read. It takes a volume or two to really find its footing but none of it is bad. Something Is Killing the Children is good too.
There are comics to suit every literary taste. Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud, is an examination of the medium in the form of a comic. Maus, by Art Spiegelman, is a dual memoir of holocaust survival and the creation of the book itself. Both are widely translated and available in public libraries.
You could use the Eisner Awards as a source of recommendations. Read the blurbs and preview pages of the winners and nominees, and select the book or series that appeals to you the most. For example, Ballad for Sophie was a recent highlight for me, and was nominated for four Eisner Awards.
DC has released a statement that Fables is NOT in the public domain.
> The Fables comic books and graphic novels published by DC, and the storylines, characters, and elements therein, are owned by DC and protected under the copyright laws of the United States and throughout the world in accordance with applicable law and are not in the public domain. DC reserves all rights and will take such action as DC deems necessary or appropriate to protect its intellectual property rights.
> Definition: To qualify as a joint work, each author's individual contribution must be inseparable or interdependent, and the authors must intend to be joint authors (17 U.S.C. s 101, Childress v. Taylor, Erickson v. Trinity Theatre, Inc.).
> Rights of use: Joint authors can independently exploit and license a work without consent of other co-authors, but have a duty to account profits to co-authors (House Report No. 94-1476 (1976), Goodman v. Lee, Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, etc.).
In an ideal world, the DC agreement is substantially fair: it gives independent authors the chance to receive better exposure, access to limitless amounts of incredibly talented professionals to help them polish their work, and a steady flow of income - in exchange for exclusivity, a chunk of money, and a certain regard for DC's investment.
But at some point, greed kicks in. DC "forget" to send a royalty check or three. They start making plans to make more and more money (games! movies!), for which original authors are just annoying roadblocks. And it all goes to hell.
This may seem like quibbling, but I think when large companies do this kind of thing, "greed" is the wrong kind of explanation. Greed is an emotion, or moral failing if you will, humans have. A company like DC is a complex, non-sentient system. It doesn't have emotions, it has interlocking sets of incentives (sales bonus plans, executive compensation based on beating last quarter's numbers, etc) which collectively and incrementally nudge the behavior of their employees towards unethical shortcuts. This tendency can be temporarily reined in by regulations, civil suits, strong-willed executives and employees, or a company culture that prizes integrity and longer-term results. When those restraints don't apply strongly enough, this behavior kicks in. I'm not sure what the right term is, but I'm reluctant to call it greed for the same reason that ChatGPT isn't "lying".
I would guess though that such arguably corrupt structures always emit from the leadership. The way to have a moral company is by having moral leadership. The issue is that there is no incentive for a company to have moral leadership (or not for that matter). It just gets the leadership it gets. If the leadership is into cutting corners, this will radiate out in the form of the mechanisms you mention, where in lower levels people WILL do immoral things not because they're greedy, but because of the compan structures put in place by the people who are.
Ultimately thoug I believe the market corrects for it. We're seeing that right now with Unity. It just takes a lot of time for a bit company like this.
> "greed" is the wrong kind of explanation. [...] A company like DC is a complex, non-sentient system. [...] it has interlocking sets of incentives [...] which collectively and incrementally nudge the behavior of their employees towards unethical shortcuts.
Institutionalised Greed is a form of Complicit Exploitation.
"I was just following orders," is one of the typical apologies.
> This tendency can be temporarily reined in by regulations, civil suits, strong-willed executives and employees, or a company culture that prizes integrity and longer-term results.
These are checks on greed, dishonesty, and cruelty. All that stands between healthy social order and chaos is the social trustworthiness of people.
The worst part is the perversion of justice of the author being provably right yet unable to enforce his legally binding contracts as an individual against a well resourced company. Hopefully this sparks a copyleft movement of public freedom.
In the 1970s Dutch lawyers, in the hippie spirit of the time, realised that only the rich could afford legal advice. So they decided to start doing pro bono work for the poor.
It sounds like this crossed the line into gluttony and premeditated long-term theft (defrauding? expropriation? ip annexation? I'm not sure what a good word is). Greed is Unity's problem, but it sounds like DC has intentionally and systematically attempted to steal from the author over many years and that is qualitatively different. Let's not let DC off with simple greed.
8kagine you're a creator who has just been accepting dc / marvel payments without auditing them until now. Maybe time to hire a professional to start working through all past payments and see how much they've been screwing you out of.
Most comics creators are not millionaires, and if DC is screwing a highly visible, highly successful author, I have to wonder how well they're treating the less visible creators
Comics creators are famously exploited. Superman's creators died in poverty, and most work by Marvel and DC is performed as "work for hire", i.e. not generating royalties for actual authors. This is also why authors increasingly try to publish independently, but that also means working on brand new series that may or may not attract any popularity and actually generate profits. For one Mark Millar or Todd McFarlane there are hundreds faring worse than Joe Shuster.
Unfortunately, considering this exact sentence shows up in every discussion on forms of government and modes of economy it isn't a easy problem to solve.
Sorry, I never meant to imply you thought the solution was simple, just lamenting the fact that greed + dishonesty (+ stupidity if we're being thorough) is such a universal problem with untold amounts of time and energy dedicated to debatable mitigation but no real solution in sight.
That's a rather naive take. There's no point moralizing, or being wishful about it. Just embrace the game theory nature of reality.
Corporate and governmental power structures will always be susceptible to capture and exploitation. We need to set up structures that can not be co-opted by the psychopaths, or at least contain a poison pill that makes them much less attractive targets for such people.
The lesson from this example is that the author maintained ownership, and so in the end could do something meaningful to combat the company that has become corrupted.
I'm kind of more afraid there's no psychopath to pin the blame on. I haven't done my homework but I suspect the system and a bunch of normal type people exhibit the same outward behavior.
I don't know Fables, but I'd love to see more things going to public domain. All fictional characters and stories, after 10 years. All software stuff, API/ABI, formats, UI and leaked source code, you should be able to use it, modify it, or even sell it. Everyday products like a washing machine, or a microwave, someone created a reliable and easy to produce microwave, now anyone should be able to mass produce it, and sell it cheaper. Produce and sell an iphone, a compatible, a partially compatible, an improved version, or whatever you want. And so on.
10 years is nothing. I'm against copyright maximalism and would love to see copyright terms whittled down, but 10 years is a non-starter.
For every Stephen King that has a massive following and would easily earn enough in those 10 years, there's 100 mid-tier and lower-tier creators that need any income they can get from works still earning in some fashion.
Also, think about how a 10 year limit would be used against creators by the Disneys of the world. "Well, damn, we don't need to arrange a movie deal with King... we'll just wait 10 years and a day and then make a movie on this book."
Hey, indie band that still scrapes by on royalties and touring? The minute your best-selling album is 10 years old, it's going to be repackaged and sold without you seeing a dime.
Yes, it's more complicated than that, but... an arbitrary 10 year limit wouldn't fix things or make the world substantially better and might make things worse.
Now - I'd be willing to talk about things like drastically shorting terms for works for hire/copyright owned by corporations and not individuals.
We might also need to think about not having one term for all things. There's no reason the copyright term for software should be the same as that for a song or a movie or a book. Books, songs, paintings, basically art should probably have a copyright term in the 25-50 year range. Certainly no longer than 50 years.
Copyrights should be more like trademarks. Use it or lose it.
Put a limit of 10 years if the work is not available for purchase by the general public, so any work that goes out of print becomes public domain 10 years after the last copy was sold.
But... Only for works owned by _corporations_. For works still owned by the original artists, works would enter public domain on the artists death or if the artist had under-age children at the moment of their passing, when the youngest completes 18.
I think this is the best way to ensure that corpos can't sit on works for eternity while allowing artists to have an income for life, with some protection for their children in case of untimely death.
In any case, any law that implements such limitations should mandate a complete removal of any DRM involved, or at least publication of the private keys needed to decrypt any work, once they become public.
14 years was good enough in the 1700s, when it was prohibitively expensive to publish anything and global distribution was effectively impossible. Today, those things are basically free and happen at close to the speed of light. If you can't make money off of something published globally after a decade, you fucked up. 10 years might even be too long.
It's 100% fine if disney wants to wait a decade to make a movie about something. After that 10 years so can everybody else! There's no amount of time disney couldn't hold out for anyway. What matters is that artistic works get into the hands of the public faster, not how much money an author might lose out on in licensing deals. Copyright doesn't exist to protect possible film deals for authors. It exists to promote the creation of new works. If disney waits 10 years and makes their film then without a license fee, mission accomplished. That's a new creative work. They can then compete with every one else making new works based on that property.
I've thought about this quite a bit. I think one fair approach would be to have a 2 tiered copyright release, where there's still a pretty long time before a work lapses into the public domain, but before that, a relatively short amount of time after the release of the work (say, 10-15 years) the original owner loses the power to dictate who uses their work. Basically, between that point and the public domain lapse, anyone would have the option to accept a default contract of paying the creator some standardized % royalties. The creator would still have the option to accept explicit contracts with weaker terms, for example waiving the royalties for projects they want to give away.
This is my view as well. Compulsory licensing after a period of exclusivity, then public domain, would be a good deal for everyone. I think this would additionally work well for patents.
> Hey, indie band that still scrapes by on royalties and touring? The minute your best-selling album is 10 years old, it's going to be repackaged and sold without you seeing a dime.
Yes, indeed. Will it be harder for indie bands? I don't think so. Will it be different? Sure. Will it be better for the society if you could have live concerts or disco parties with great songs? Absolutely.
Also bands play each others songs without asking or paying royalty in practice where I live. I've gone and have paid a band to perform someone elses songs. It is definitely a good thing.
Have you asked indie bands? Cause... I'm skeptical they're going to be happy with your proposals given that they're already hanging by a pretty thin thread.
Playing songs live != repackaging recordings. Not even in the same ballpark. Venues of size pay licenses to ASCAP, etc. for the rights to let cover bands do this -- but it's also a usage that requires a lot more factors than just copying the song. At least in the U.S. these uses are pretty much automated vs. negotiating rights to reproduce a full album or even a single.
(Tribute bands are another animal entirely - I'm not sure how or if the various Pink Floyd tribute bands, for instance, negotiate deals with the original bands since they're not just covering the songs - they also get into likeness rights and trademark, etc.)
Live performances are a different act than recording and selling albums. Live performances are always (?) allowed, but IIRC, the songwriter/composer is due a royalty.
How often that happens in real life is a question, but live performances (currently) have a different set of rules.
It might improve thr situation a lot for Spotify etc. because without a legal instrument determining ownership, they might just let the first poster of a song be the owner of a song - which means anyone tries to post their song asap, even if they don't believe in Spotify.
Copyright should be 30 years for free, then 1 dollar doubling annually thereafter. 40 years of copyright should cost $2047, while 49 years costs a little over a million. So does the 50th year. Pay the public for your monopoly on publishing.
I wonder if tax policy could be used to encourage placing content in the public domain. This could especially be useful for software, since there probably isn’t much money to be made in selling Windows 3.1 licenses, but a nominal tax credit could encourage Microsoft to put it in the public domain and let the public play around with it, inspire them, etc.
Spend a couple hours recording a joke song on your phone that happens to become a viral hit? Ten years of monopolizing it seems more than fair.
Spend millions of dollars hiring a research team and running gene sequencers for years to develop a state of the art drug? Maybe 10 years isn't enough.
> Also, think about how a 10 year limit would be used against creators by the Disneys of the world. "Well, damn, we don't need to arrange a movie deal with King... we'll just wait 10 years and a day and then make a movie on this book."
They might say that, but they're just signing their own death warrant. Those who watch, like myself, will just wait out the 10 years and download it. (Well, not really, I will probably download it the next day).
It cuts both ways.
> Now - I'd be willing to talk about things like drastically shorting terms for works for hire/copyright owned by corporations and not individuals.
There is no legal distinction here, and there can't be. Even individuals will spin up an LLC which has ownership of that stuff, for tax/bankruptcy/whatever reasons. Do they lose copyright because they were business savvy?
> We might also need to think about not having one term for all things. There's no reason the copyright term for software should be the same as that for a song or a movie or a book. Books, songs, paintings, basically art should probably have a copyright term in the 25-50 year range. Certainly no longer than 50 years.
I'd go the other direction. 18 months, no renewals, and no criminal charges for infringement without proof of infringement for commercial sales, and most of all any works with DRM left out in the cold and can never get copyright protection (not even if they later release a version without DRM).
> They might say that, but they're just signing their own death warrant. Those who watch, like myself, will just wait out the 10 years and download it. (Well, not really, I will probably download it the next day).
What does copyright length matter to people who wouldn't respect any of it?
Define it then in terms of "10 years or an X amount of revenue generated, whichever is achieved later" where X is defined in terms of the country's economic performance.
>The minute your best-selling album is 10 years old, it's going to be repackaged and sold without you seeing a dime.
The story is that most bands don't make anything on residuals and so have to tour to make money.
But, in any case, one can already get the work for free, people choose not to.
I have an idea on Origin Marks [1] that works here, only one source will be the lead singer, only one source will be the songwriter, buy from them _if_you_want_to_.
[1] the reverse of Trademarks, kinda, they would show not the seller per se, as Trademarks do, but the physical origins - and all historic details would attach to the mark. Change the factory, OM shows it, sell your Trademark, OM shows if it's still made in the same place or not; buying an article, OM shows which of your options are made in the same place. OM would show not just so sold it to you, not where they got it from -- cut out middlemen and optimise supply chains, that's capitalism, right?
In this case, you buy a download, who did they get the TM rights from, ego did they get the cover art rights from, who did they buy the license for the music track from? Seller would be obliged to tell you, and there sellers too ... no money going to the band, don't use that supplier, go elsewhere.
> We might also need to think about not having one term for all things. There's no reason the copyright term for software should be the same as that for a song or a movie or a book. Books, songs, paintings, basically art should probably have a copyright term in the 25-50 year range. Certainly no longer than 50 years.
Of course there is no reason, but 10 years seems about right to me for all of them. You create something, you get revenue for it for 10 years, now that's enough, stop hogging the art, invention, standard, whatever from the society.
I think it is a fair amount of time, I don't get the arguments that they 'deserve' more.
Also please notice, that the current copyright laws are made by the society and not by God, not a law of Nature, not a Human Right or such. We made the laws to support artists and research, but I think it restricts both culture and both the quality of life too much.
Why does Wintel 'deserve' several hundreds of billions of dollars, just because they managed themselves into a rent-seeking position and we must pay them to run any software? Why there is no gold standard of microwave oven or a washing machine that everyone can produce, so a competition could push down the prices, and you could buy replacement parts for it? Why can't I pay very talented writers to write my little pony stories? I want to. Also why is it illegal to live on writing of my little pony stories? Why can't I buy a T-shirt with a custom my little pony image I like? Or why is it illegal to maintain and modify a 10 year old version of photoshop? Sure, then their own 10 year old versions would appear as a competition to Adobe, and that would hurt a lot compared to the current situation, but then it is their job to be better. Etc. How do all of this benefit the society?
Copyright laws were created originally by the society to support artists and research, but they are way too long, mostly are just used for rent-seeking, and they restrict our lives. I don't think creators 'deserve' anything, but I think a hard 10 year period is about okay to the original creators or the publishers to monetize the product, then move on to an another product, or do whatever they want.
> I don't think creators 'deserve' anything, but I think a hard 10 year period is about okay to the original creators or the publishers to monetize the product, then move on to an another product, or do whatever they want.
If we're going to use terms like "deserve", then why are you deserving of someone else's work? It doesn't sound like you're even arguing that you could build upon that work, you just don't want to have to pay for it. Having some third party selling other people's art work without licensing them isn't exactly the proliferation of the arts typically argued for with lowering the copyright duration.
You're also severely downplaying just how hard it is to earn money from a creation. Bootstrapping a business is a lot of work. It can be years before you earn even a paltry sum. A good chunk of that 10 years is spent earning nothing. Maybe an established player like Disney can turn on a spigot and cash comes out, but that's not how it works for most people. I also don't see how investing in the creation of something that others find valuable is "rent-seeking". You're completely free to ignore that body of work. Nothing is restricting you from creating your own.
You see the free exchange of art without remuneration in this hypothetical future as a way to drive down costs. I see artists saying "why bother?" and an inevitable stifling of art. Most of us aren't independently wealthy or magnanimous enough to work for free.
> If we're going to use terms like "deserve", then why are you deserving of someone else's work?
Let's be honest, copyright is unnatural. Without copyright if I hear a story, what right has anyone else got to tell me I can't tell my version of that story as I remember it to someone else? If I hear a melody, what right does anyone have to tell me that I can't sing it?
That's literally how society and art has worked for as long as humanity has existed. Hearing and retelling. Seeing and replicating. Re-interrupting and re-envisioning.
The idea that certain ideas are forbidden, or that certain notes are owned is ridiculous. It's not normal. It's an invented legal restriction we put on ourselves. Copyright is an imposition on some very basic freedoms, we just all agree that some amount of imposition is worth it to support artists and their art. Art is so valuable to us that we censor ourselves for it.
What I'm seeing with our current copyright system is that it's hurting a lot more than it's helping. Artists are routinely getting screwed over by large corporations, while other artists are silenced entirely. Amazing creative works are prevented from being brought into the world, and have been prevented from even being preserved. We need to strike a better balance between our freedoms to share and use our own culture and supporting artists and supporting art because our current copyright system is doing a terrible job at all of it.
I think there's two different arguments going on. A key difference between today and the two thousand years that came before is you can make a perfect replica of the source material. Selling a bit-for-bit copy of a song or book is fundamentally different than oral traditions of story telling or an acoustic cover of a popular song.
I'm not saying copyright is perfect. DMCA takedowns for songs playing in the background of live newsworthy events or video game play throughs aren't helping the author/creator. Legal battles over songs that coincidentally sound the same are silly to me as well.
I'm less sold on the value of remixing art. It can be done well, but often feels like a lazy attempt at capitalizing on the original creation.
We don't have to agree on any of that. The person I was replying to seemed to be making the argument that copyright terms were bad because he/she/they wanted to buy a copy of whatever on the open market where hypothetically everything is public domain. I can't comprehend the level of entitlement that leads to someone saying they should have free access to another person's work and then claims without evidence that this will spur innovation or creativity. To me, it seems clear the lack of copyright would just rapidly accelerate the decline of the humanities. Artists struggle enough. The patron model of the Renaissance is gone. The modern day minstrel can't afford rent and food. Copyright is central to how they earn a living and about the only protection they have against parasites that add nothing from taking everything.
I'm all for revisiting and revising modern copyright law. I just think tossing it all together is going to hurt society. Whatever new duration we choose should reflect the reality of just how long it can take to build a business/following/audience. Ten years seems way too short; I see artists deciding the risk:reward ratio makes it not worthwhile.
Maybe that means only the "true" artists will persist, but my experience with open source software suggests otherwise. There's some remarkable open source software out there given away freely by volunteers, but there's also a whole body of software that benefits society that only gets written because the rights holder can afford to make an investment that volunteers can't or won't. That works because there's a potential to earn something when all finished.
There's a new company of the same name continuing work on a Wolf Among Us 2, which is one of Bill Willingham's complaints that led to the public domain PR release because Willingham still believes he was severely underpaid for his property for the first game, and that DC licensed it without his permission in the first place.
> All fictional characters and stories, after 10 years.
Girl Genius has been publishing a page of their comic three times a week for twenty years, and the story is not yet done. I think they deserve to hold it for a little longer.
They would only lose ownership to their earlier strips by now. Also anything else would be fan fiction. It wouldn’t remove the primacy of author created works. I mean if I create a XXX Fables movie no one will consider it authentic or canon.
"Only" handwaves away a lot. It would put the characters into public domain and rob the authors of the ability to sustain themselves selling collections of early strips.
"No one will consider it authentic or canon." Citation very much needed. When there's demand for something, people will take what's offered. I would be fine with some sort of easy licensing scheme that would allow others to write stories, etc., in someone else's universe / with their characters... but they should see a taste. Especially when we're talking about mid-tier or lower-tier creators who are probably depending heavily on that large body of work to keep the lights on.
> It would put the characters into public domain and rob the authors of the ability to sustain themselves selling collections of early strips.
That's not true. It might make it harder to make as much money, but there's nothing that says the author can't still profit from selling something after it's in the public domain. I've paid for works in the public domain multiple times, sometimes directly to the author of the work.
Creators have a massive advantage when selling their own stuff. They can include things like signed copies and extras that no one else ever could. Fans want to support the creators of the things they love because they want more of it.
> "No one will consider it authentic or canon." Citation very much needed.
I'm not saying that you should be able to claim yourself to be walt disney, but you should be able to sell a hand made mickey mouse plushie, or a mickey mouse comic (under your name). That's different.
There's a lot of Girl Genius stuff on AO3. The Foglios (authors) seem okay with fanwork existing (there's even a fanfic-discussion channel on the semi-official Girl Genius Discord server). Of course, stuff on AO3 doesn't make money, which may be a sticking point.
They would not just lose ownership of the strips. Ownership of the characters and world setting would also be open. Other people would be free to publish stories using their characters.
If someone creates a new version so good that vastly outclasses the original version it deserves to make that profit. That's kind of the point. We want more amazing creative works. That's what copyright was for: to encourage the creation of new works.
We've already been robbed of all the amazing creative works that might have been but never were because of excessive copyright restrictions. It's hurting artists and it's hurting our culture.
We want copyright to give authors a chance to profit for a limited time, but it we need it to be much less excessive and restrictive so that new works and new artists can thrive.
> I think they deserve to hold it for a little longer.
I don't see why. I don't see why should they have the exclusive right to sell it anymore, and sue anyone that creates a derivative work based on their work older than 10 years.
Also Girl Genius still would have a lot of options to make money of it. I just think derivative work should be able to appear, and more than 10 years old stuff should be free as in freedom and as in free beer. And we, as a society could choose this by modifying our laws.
10 is a bit hard to bootstrap R&D and regain the invested money (especially when you build something over multiple years). But 20 years .. should work. Was not the original copyright for books something like 30 years.
My qualm is that it can take a lifetime of pushing around a script or a novel before it gets made. Publishers and studios would have an incentive to accept every script submitted and purposely ignore it for 20 and then look at them now that they are free… ideally it’d be 20 years after it got big but that’s not enforceable and vague.
That only works if every single publisher and studio are participating in an anticompetitive cabal who are all colluding to prevent the work from being bought, in which case you have bigger problems to worry about.
I think he's pointing out that an anticompetitive cabal already exists, so assuming it would continue to follow anticompetitive practices is not a leap of any kind.
> I think he's pointing out that an anticompetitive cabal already exists,
Of course, they're called _unions_, which prevent companies from hiring or contracting anyone who isn't part of their cabal -- I mean union.
Disney and Comcast and WB/Discovery are _competitors_ who would cut each other's throats for a nickel. Would they collude for profit? Sure, but they treat this as a zero-sum game, so they don't want to help their competition too much.
> Publishers and studios would have an incentive to accept every script submitted and purposely ignore it for 20 and then look at them now that they are free
If publishers and studios refuse to ever publish anything for 10 years artists will be free to publish things for themselves and you can bet that they will. I seriously doubt there'll never be a studio or publisher smart enough to pay for a script or book and bring it to the market first though.
Once a property is out there and has a fanbase they'd be total idiots to wait until every last person on earth can churn out media involving that property because for anything remotely popular the moment the 10 years are up the market will be saturated with new versions and remixes of it. They don't want that kind of competition, especially from people outside of the industry. Copyright has been corrupted into the restrictive vice on our culture that it is today in part because of that fear.
If you are a studio or publisher it'd be far better to pay the licensing fee and rake in the massive profits within the 10 year period before everyone is tired of seeing a billion versions of something on offer everywhere and avoid having to spend the kind of money and effort it would take to differentiate your work and pull attention from everything else springing up.
Now this is really sad. This is why we don't have nice things.
I believe the "natural" state of the society where we can build on each others work, but copyrights make that practically impossible.
It lowers the quality of art significantly (I do believe that most art pieces could be significantly improved, but we can't do that).
It lowers the quality of cars, electronics, and other products, also their reparability from 100% to 0% or so, as they constantly discontinue past products, and make them shittier, and they prohibit 3rd party to make replacement parts, and we can do nothing against it.
And it allows rent-seeking behaviour, for example we gave Intel a hundred of billions of dollars or so, because the prevented other companies to produce x86 compatible chips, and they could get away with ridiculous profits. This would be illegal if Intel was a 'monopoly', but the same rent-seeking and abusing the market is not illegal since Intel is not a monopoly. Or countless other examples.
The article states that we almost developed a sane society where we could build and sell whatever we wanted, and use whatever we found (even if it was made by an other person), but the exact opposite happened. The article does not mention the reasons.
Yes. The worst part is our current effectively-infinite copyright length is a very recent invention, but it's already taken root as the-way-things-are. Imagine a world where copyright lasts 28 years max. How different would our culture be? All of our early computing history would be 100% freely available, no questions asked. Windows XP would be nearing the end of its copyright term. This is the way things were for centuries, right up until 1978 when things started going off the rails.
To some extent I think that was always an early aim of Creative Commons. I don't think Creative Commons ever saw their job as being a charity owner of IP, but they certainly tried their best to provide as many tools as possible to liberate IP and patents to either copyleft or the public domain (CC0) as they could.
I could certainly imagine an alternate future that if CC got enough donations to back a big enough budget they could help pay for lawyers to full time help creators claw back IPs from major corporations with the hopes to CC or CC0 license the rights that they win back. I also imagine that would cost a lot of money and that hypothetical arm of CC would need a huge budget to win the legal fights it would want to take on.
That was basically what happened to Blender, I think? I have been thinking it would be nice if someone was organizing crowdfunding and taking care of all the legal work to buy out old works properly. Thinking mostly of stuff with little value, that ought to be cheap. The rights to records released on small labels a long time ago that never sold very well to begin with. Obscure comicbooks. B horror movies. Low-budget video games. Old boardgames and tabletop-RPG books (illustrations included, ideally). Things that no one is making any money off anyway. Maybe something more high profile now and then.
But on the other hand if that was done on a large scale it might set an expectation that old things are bought out, or even that anyone ought to be paid to release anything free at all, and that sounds very bad.
Legally speaking this would involve actually purchasing those outright. Sidestepping any questions about copyright assignment and rights reversion, the main problem here would be cost. Most companies that own works anyone of us care about significantly overvalue their ownership in the work, like to the point where ownership is either not for sale or would only be offered for a ludicrous price.
You'd be better off lobbying to weaken copyright protections. There are several charities interested in doing so, but they all have different kinds of baggage: donating to the FSF means Stallman's Way or the Highway, donating to the EFF means supporting Protect The Stack[0]. RPG[1] is run by Louis Rossmann who is fairly chill[2], but they're also the weakest in terms of anticopyright. Nobody wants to purely abolish or reform copyright; they want to do so as a means to achieve some other ends.
Putting that aside, there's also the problem that proposals to reform copyright go absolutely nowhere. Copyright maximalism is pretty uniformly supported by almost the entire US political class[3] and even very mild reforms like right-to-repair face fairly extreme bipartisan opposition. Not even the fascist-lite (DeSantis/Trump) wing of the Republican Party is willing to kick Disney in the copyright balls.
Illegally speaking, the Internet Archive is perfectly willing to publicly archive works they don't own, and they are saints for doing so. But they are also having their balls sued off.
[0] To paraphrase a lot, it means "ISPs should not have abuse desks".
[1] Repair Preservation Group
[2] He does have a right-libertarian bent and an axe to grind against New York's government, though that can be explained by them trying to kill his business
[3] Corporate leadership inclusive. Most corporations should be considered to be a kind of shadow government, not just as private entities.
As I understand United States copyright law, it is impossible for an author to voluntarily enter something into the public domain. They can license it to whomever they like, of course, on any terms that are legal within a contract (including creative commons licensing), but they can't just say "this is public domain".
It is especially true when they fail to give license terms. People using it as if it were public domain don't have a license, or any proof of having a license, and if the author dies tomorrow, his or her heirs inherit the copyright (which will still last for another 75 or 95 years, I forget which). They now own it, and can go after those who use it for copyright infringement, with all the penalties that go with that. If the heirs were particularly powerful or have political influence, they might even manage to get the DOJ to pursue the matter as criminal.
Thought I've never watched the show, doesn't one of the characters in The Office start talking about how he's "declaring bankruptcy" by saying those words emphatically, where the other characters try to explain how it doesn't work that way? He then goes on to say "I'm not just saying it, but declaring bankruptcy" as if this is somehow a legally important distinction?
You are only allowed to produce and sell an existing product, if the original creator allows you to do. In theory you can message LG that you'd love to sell one of their older models for a fee for every sold piece, but I theorize that it would be a much better world if you wouldn't need their permission for this.
A meta aspect of this is going unspoken: the stories and characters in the Fables comics are (mostly) pulled from the public domain.
Snow White, The Three Little Pigs, Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, and Peter Piper are all characters walking around and with jobs in the Fable Universe.
I see Bill putting his work back into the public domain as a kind of "thank you" to the original creators.
Personally, I fully support this "Willingham copyright". 20 years for the creators (I would have said 50, but I guess I'm greedy), and then a limited private run so that the creator can sell it and get a nice mature payment for it (again, would have gone 20 years on this, just to get the companies that are going to do a 10-movie saga plenty to salivate over), and then it's off to the public domain! Sounds perfect, to me!
My way would have kept it out of public hands for ~70 years, which feels about right to me. I don't know if I, personally, feel like content made in the 90's shouldn't profit the creator anymore. Whereas stuff from the 50's and before definitely feels like no one should be able to take ownership of it. If it stuck around that long, it's in the pop culture and belongs to all of us. "Mickey Mouse" isn't just a character, it's a touchstone for other content to riff on. That's kind of the whole point of public domain; that and reinvention.
All of that said, I guess "Ghostbusters" kind of has a similar pop culture weight so I'm happy to amend my numbers down toward Bill's. My main interest is in making sure creators get paid commensurate to the impact of their work (as opposed to the work they put in to make it), in such a way that they can make a living off any profitable endeavor for the duration of that project's viability. If 30 years works for that, then I'm completely for it!
I think 10-15 years of exclusivity, followed by 20 years of compulsory licensing before entering the public domain would be even more fair. That way, creators can get paid for longer, while further creativity is less stifled.
I would agree with your preference, especially because many artists have to retire off of their creations, and also disabled people are likely more represented in art. The woman who wrote Jonathan strange & mr norrell has severe chronic fatigue syndrome, obviously can’t work. By the presented logic she’s almost out of time for earnings, and she’s nowhere near old enough where that wouldn’t be significant.
I think this strikes a great balance. Creators have a comfy window for financial reward and big firms have less of a stranglehold on culture.
> In my template for radical reform of those laws I would like it if any IP is owned by its original creator for up to twenty years from the point of first publication, and then goes into the public domain for any and all to use. However, at any time before that twenty year span bleeds out, you the IP owner can sell it to another person or corporate entity, who can have exclusive use of it for up to a maximum of ten years. That’s it. Then it cannot be resold. It goes into the public domain. So then, at the most, any intellectual property can be kept for exclusive use for up to about thirty years, and no longer, without exception.
The problem with that is the same as with current copyright law. It's easy for lobbyists to get simple changes like changing "10 years" to "70 years". Or resold once to resold twice, because what's good for the economy one time must certainly be double good if we do it twice.
I lean toward making copyright non-transferable. The author keeps it for X years. They are free to license it if someone else can do better at making money from it. The problem with this seems to be group works like movies. Not sure how that would work.
> They are free to license it if someone else can do better at making money from it.
An exclusive sublicensable license is effectively identical to transfer, so there's no meabingful difference between licensable and transferrable (especially the status quo “transferrable, but reclaimable after a set period of years irrespective of the nominal terms of transfer”.)
> The problem with this seems to be group works like movies.
Movies generally don't rely on cooyright transfer, they rely on legal (not merely natural) persons being original copyright holders, and works-for-hire having copyright owned by the hiring party ab initio.
Reselling seems fine if the clock doesn't reset in subsequent sales. You also can't really avoid it since they can have an LLC buy the IP and then just sell the ownership of the LLC.
It seems that the one-time reselling clause can be easily abused by the original IP holder to effectively extend their 20 years to 30 years and enable unlimited reselling? Just sell it to a company you control at the end of 20 years, and you get another 10 years. You can then sell the company to whoever is interested in the IP, and they can also do that, as long as it’s the ownership of the company rather than the IP that’s being transferred technically.
It seems much simpler to just shorten copyright protection. Whether 20 years or 30 years, the world will be a more creative place than it currently is.
A cute gesture I guess but honestly "adult revisions of old public domain children's stories" is a really glutted genre in comics, there's a constant churn of people trying to build a reputation in the field with "what if Snow White had guns and a sword and grudge against the Three Big Hogs who run all the crime in this town" or whatever.
Effectively he's just handed this property off to DC for free, I sure wouldn't touch this without an expert IP lawyer willing to defend me for free and a deep dive into the exact copyright/trademark status of everything related to Fables. It might be a decent publicity stunt for a small publisher to bait DC into suing them, I'm sure there's a few people who are already pondering this and asking themselves who in their regular stable of artists and writers might be willing to spend a while on a risky project like this. And if they're willing to risk the whole company on it.
PS. In issue 17, "The Guns Of Snow White" pivots to "The Fabulous Adventures Of Hans My Hedgehog" after he was introduced as Snow's sidekick in issue 12 and kinda stole the show with his snarky ultraviolence act.
> I guess you won’t be getting much work from DC in the future.
I like the response to that.
Many years ago I had “You'll never work with us again if X” from a company, where “X” amounted to expecting them to keep their side of an agreement wrt payment terms, to which I enjoyed responding “Oh, I insist on X. Whether I work for you again is not entirely your decision to make. I won't be doing BTW.”. A couple of months later they asked me to look at something and were surprised when I didn't jump to make myself available… They were also upset that I wouldn't give them contact details for other people I knew who could help (I did offer to pass details out to my social circle, but they said to not bother myself - presumably they knew I'd include warnings with the job spec!).
I can't seem to find that statement and the response to it. Could you link or copy/paste it?
Edit: Nevermind, I found it in his follow-up:
> Q: I guess you won’t be getting much work from DC in the future.
> Bill: I haven’t worked with DC for the more than two years since I handed in my final script for this new run of Fables. At that point I fired the lot of them and haven’t regretted it. Why spend my remaining years continuing to work with thugs and conmen?
I was interested in the technicalities around releasing something into the public domain and found that there is precedent and case law around it already in the US:
“[T]he author or proprietor of any work made the subject of copyright by the
Copyright Law may abandon his literary property in the work before he has published it, or his copyright in it after he has done so; but he must abandon it by
some overt act which manifests his purpose to surrender his rights in the work, and
to allow the public to copy it.”[0]
Since you're on the theme of technicalities I have a slightly different technical question: How could his work ever be released, practically speaking?
Can he release it? No, according to his contract (per the OP blog post) he can only publish it through DC.
Can some other entity release it? They'd need a copy of it. But are there any copies that are actually 100% his work? If you alter a public domain work, I don't think that altered work is public domain. It's not like the GPL. I'd imagine the altered work belongs to the alter-er. Surely DC had some slight nuance, a watermark, a logo, etc on whatever copies they released. Could they file a suit against somebody who scans and re-releases an old release?
Honestly I don't think it will change anything. I doubt anyone will touch it without a contract with DC.
Public domain is not even recognized in every country which mean that international commercialization of any derivative work would be complicated or even impossible. Even worse, in this case Bill Willingham do not even have contract right to republish Fables. He cannot republish it and add an anti-copyright-notice to it. According to my short research it seems to be a requirement to waive copyright and put something in the public domain according to the Bern Convention. I doubt a blog post is enough, at least internationally.
I won't expect to see any movie of Fables without DC permission.
Feel free to chime in and correct me if you are an international copyright laws expert.
I've been advised that in the US it's not possible to declare something public domain, that the closest thing is CC0 or a similar license.
But surely if he doesn't have the right to give specific licenses to individuals he doesn't have the right to CC0 license it either. Based on what I understand, DC will be able to win this that he can't actually do this.
Some countries like Germany and Japan don't recognize public domain dedication. But afaik the United States does. There is one oddity in the US which is that Section 203 of the Copyright Act grants the author of a work the right to cancel "the exclusive or nonexclusive grant of a transfer or license of copyright or of any right under a copyright" up to thirty-five years after the grant or transfer occurred (only applicable to works not created "for hire"). So you could argue under that until 35 years have elapsed the work isn't truly in the public domain because the original author of the work has the statutory right to reclaim its copyright.
That said, could the author here have used Section 203 to revoke DC's license? I see section 203 requires that "Notices of termination may be served no earlier than 25 years after the execution of the grant or, if the grant covers the right of publication, no earlier than 30 years after the execution of the grant or 25 years after publication under the grant (whichever comes first)."
So maybe the author could have waited a few more years and done that?
I'm not entirely sure you need to republish a work in order to disclaim copyright on it. The only thing I'm aware of in US law is that you have to make some kind of 'overt act', which just means you have to actually intend to make something public domain. I think posting two Substack posts detailing contractual breaches and bad faith at DC as motivation qualifies.
Germany and Japan don't recognize public domain dedications in the law. However, this isn't a German or Japanese creator we're talking about - Bill Willingham is American. And generally speaking, the Berne Convention is just a promise to treat other countries' copyrights the same as your country would, not an obligation to provide more copyright to foreign works than domestic ones[0]. I doubt Germany is going to ultimately enforce copyright that has already evaporated in America, especially on behalf of DC, a party that doesn't actually own the copyright in question and only has an exclusive license.
What's really going to complicate this is the nature of the agreement between Bill and DC. DC could argue that an exclusive license is equivalent to copyright transfer. Copyright is corporate Calvinball, so we could see American courts trying to roll back the public domain dedication purely for the sake of submission to monied interests. I could see all sorts of stupid arguments being adopted by judges that want to see DC win and artists lose:
- Well actually, he was trying to revert rights from DC by making his work public domain, but he didn't follow the notice period requirements, so the dedication is null and void
- Well actually, the publishing agreement constitutes an effective copyright transfer, so he's just releasing DC of their obligations to him, so DC now owns Fables in perpetuity
- Well actually, Bill Willingham didn't draw the art[1], so you can't put Fables on Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, or Wikimedia Commons, all you can do is have all the male characters in your folklore be one man named 'Jack' and nothing more
As far as I'm aware, "artist burns down the copyright on their work to moot a publishing agreement" is uncharted legal territory. How any of these arguments would fare would depend on the exact text of the DC Comics publishing agreement Bill signed, which isn't public, and Bill probably can't proactively publish it. If he can, he should. Otherwise you'd only learn how much he can actually disclaim iff you get sued by DC and are able to bring the contract into the scope of discovery, which isn't exactly guaranteed.
[1] Copyright is not only viral, but also leprotic: every new instance of creativity accrues a separate copyright on that part of the work that is owned by that creator insamuch as it can be separated from the whole. This is why the GPL needs to have a copyleft clause.
>Otherwise you'd only learn how much he can actually disclaim iff you get sued by DC and are able to bring the contract into the scope of discovery, which isn't exactly guaranteed.
Wouldn't the legal and financial burden be only on him?
He is by all account the copyright holder. He says you can do the f. you want with his work. You haven't signed any contract with DC.
You release some derived work commercially.
DC might sue him for granting rights to a third party that infringe n exclusivity clause.
But you aren't bound by any contract with DC, you aren't infringing anything if the sole copyright holder expressely gave you the permission.
DC's argument would be that the exclusivity clause bars Bill from declaring his work public domain, and thus the dedication is null and void.
The law does distinguish between a license and a public domain dedication. If Bill had instead put Fables under, say, CC-BY, that license absolutely would be invalid - you can't license rights you don't have, and the person with exclusive rights would be able to sue anyone who used the work under CC-BY[0]. But the public domain is not a licensing agreement, it's dissolving the foundation of that license agreement, and there's no precedent for what happens when there's exclusivity clauses in play.
Because there's no clear precedent[1], that means any lawsuit involving these rights would survive a motion to dismiss, meaning that the "fuck around and find out" liability falls on anyone actually trying to use Fables as a public domain work. This is to DC's favor: if they sued Bill directly, Bill would be able to point out the numerous contractual breaches DC executed, which would dissolve their agreement. But if they sue a rando, they might just settle to make the suit go away. Even if the rando was motivated to prove DC wrong, they don't have standing to legislate contractual breaches DC made to third parties, so DC would be able to legally assert rights they might not even have.
[0] While Creative Commons wasn't involved, the situation would otherwise be identical to the Harmony Gold/Mechwarrior lawsuit. BattleTech, a tabletop giant robot miniature game, licensed some mech designs from various Japanese cartoons. Those same cartoons were also licensed by Harmony Gold and Frankensteined together into a single cartoon called Robotech. BattleTech licensed out their miniature game to Activision to make a PC game called Mechwarrior. Harmony Gold sued because mechs from their cartoon were in their PC game, and the ultimate result was that because of the exclusivity clauses in play, BattleTech's license to Activision for those specific mech designs was null and void, so Activision was infringing Harmony Gold's rights.
Yes, this is one of those legendary lawsuits that you hear about from MechWarrior fans in the same way that rhythm game fans will never forget what Konami did to In The Groove.
[1] I fully expect an actual lawyer to reply with clear precedent in DC's favor. The best search engine is to reply with the wrong answer on Hacker News.
>>>> you aren't infringing anything if the sole copyright holder expressely gave you the permission.
It's clear he's transfered some rights to DC via an exclusive license. He may be the sole copyright owner, but he isn't the sole person with an ownership interest in Fables, and it's not clear that a third party with an ownership interest (DC comics) can't sue you.
For someone who isn't really into comic book stuff - Good.
Watching from the sidelines it's clear these companies extract every bit of value from the creators, while also making sure they have 100% ownership of their output.
Don Rosa, who has drawn fantastic Donald Duck stories for Disney is a tragic example of this. The fans identify him with his work, but AFAIK Disney of course does not reward him in any way beyond the original contract terms.
While I understand he did this in order to not have the hassle of going to court over these issues he brings up. There is not a single doubt in me that DC is not going to try and take this decision to court anyway, no matter how few grounds they actually have for it.
> I've decided to take a different approach, and fight them in a
> different arena, inspired by the principles of asymmetric warfare.
There's nothing so formidable as an enemy who has nothing to lose.
Relevant aside: Few know that not only did we British invent
concentration camps, we more or less wrote the playbook on suicide
bombing. I've seen rare and disturbing Home Guard training films. It
was not all "Dad's Army". One tag-line was "You can always take one
with you".
Anyway, the point is not about improvised explosives, and women using
prams to walk right into a group of occupying soldiers, but about how
a struggle changes once the underdog realises they really have nothing
much left to lose.
"You can always take one with you" is the proposed campaign in the event Sealion (German amphibious invasion of Great Britain) was attempted successfully. Having actually seen Overlord (the exact opposite scenario, "D Day") we know Sealion could not have worked, although of course in 1940 the British couldn't know that and were right to worry about it.
Since Hitler's general staff believed Sealion wouldn't work it was never attempted and so although "You can always take one with you" was considered it was never actually used.
There were guerrilla units established who had more targeted training (ie. To assassinate collaborators in any puppet government) but that wasn't necessarily a suicide mission and it wasn't general, the "you can always take one with you" messaging would have addressed the general population.
I have to say i'd love to read about those sorts of things if you have a link. I've long been interested in british warfare, since learning about trench warfare going on in new zealand Māori and east india company battles
In this case, I hope they do - and that people keep making them do it - soon DC will need a legal team just to deal with these cases - or they will learn to give up.
Yes, but by putting it into the public domain, Willingham just created a large group with an incentive to fund the lawyers working against DC. Public interest groups and other publishers both could join lawsuits.
If I were a DC executive, and if he is not badly misinterpreting their contract, I would be very mad at the lawyer that drafted said contract. So I'm confused. What's going on? How did this happen?
Was the DC contract drafted sloppily to allow this because no-one could imagine the edge case of him throwing away money?
Is he creatively interpreting it ("it doesn't say anywhere that dogs can't play basketball" wouldn't really stand in court, and I'm suspicious about "I am not allowed to authorize anyone else to print fanfics of Fables but I am allowed to authorize everyone else to authorize anyone else to print them)?
Is he reneging on an obligation towards them that they can and will sue him for (or maybe the way the contract dealt with this was saying he can't do this and if he does the contract is void and he pays a small fine, and he doesn't care about the small fine or the contract)?
> I would be very mad at the lawyer that drafted said contract.
It actually sounds like the standard contract DC use with "author-owned" material at least since Watchmen (and possibly before): creators maintain ownership of the IP, but publication/distribution rights of certain amounts of material are granted exclusively to DC - as long as such material is made available for sale.
This is famously how they locked away Watchmen: they kept reprinting the original run in paperbacks every year, so that the publication clause would never expire and Moore/Gibbons would never be able to take it elsewhere (and never be able to claim full royalties rather than a determined, reduced rate). I think there were lawsuits at some point, but the outcome was just a little more money for authors.
Willingham seems to have decided to take the nuclear option instead, by releasing the IP in the public domain. This means the already-published material will remain the preserve of DC, but anyone is supposedly free to write and publish new stories with the same characters. As others stated, it's unlikely to happen on a large scale, because of the chilling effect of potentially having to go against DC/Warner in court; but it should ensure fanfic and other creative expressions can flourish.
To be fair for Watchmen, the Watchmen deal was made at a time where paperback reprints were rare, and they obviously kept reprinting it because they genuinely wanted to make money from directly selling it, not because they were reprinting 10 copies a year just to keep the contract from expiring.
I don't think that's verifiable without receipts. I'm pretty sure at some point (late '90s) you could get such paperbacks on the secondhand market for pennies, and everyone had one already.
He owns the copyright for Fables. He has released the copyright for Fables into the public domain. He does not have the right to release the official comic series into the public domain because DC Comics has partial ownership of that. His contract with DC Comics is still in effect and has not been broken. He is not creating new Fables comics but is not preventing the official series from being sold.
I think fundamental to Willingham's action, and his intent, is that there now is no "official" Fables comic series. There's DC's version of Fables, but now anyone can make one with equal legitimacy.
If people treat the DC version as "official", then that has some (not all) of the same effects as claiming that Willingham gave DC the copyrights in the first place. DC can't sue anyone if they aren't the owner, but they can take advantage of fandom's desire for an "official" version to crowd out anyone else writing such a comic, and threaten competitors with lawsuits to get them to stay away (IANAL and don't know exactly how much they could do).
I would be very surprised if his contract didn't have the word "exclusive" in key places, which this change of ownership will now make incorrect, creating an actionable tort (in my layperson understanding). I like what the author is trying to do here but I expect it to fail when inevitably challenged.
That’s the thing with the public domain; it’s irrevocable. He’s already done it. What he has done cannot be undone. Unless a court decides that because he have an exclusive license to DC he cannot release his rights to the public domain, the worst that can happen is that the copyright is in the public domain and he has broken his contract with DC and thus is liable.
> If I understand the law correctly (and be advised that copyright law is a mess; purposely vague and murky, and no two lawyers – not even those specializing in copyright and trademark law – agree on anything), you have the rights to make your Fables movies, and cartoons, and publish your Fables books, and manufacture your Fables toys, and do anything you want with your property, because it’s your property.
The tricky bit with this is, are you okay accepting a lawsuit from DC comics, possibly one that will drag on for years and years?
Aside from the murky nature of the law, anyone can sue anyone in the US, for more or less any reason. And unless it's complete bogus and gets thrown out at an early stage, you can cause someone a whole bunch of hurt. Who is right and wrong according to the law only marginally comes in to play.
In this case, it's not even clear to me Willingham has the right to single-handedly place something in the public domain; did no one else work on those comics? Don't they also own a piece of copyright (which they perhaps signed over to DC?) This is like the main author of an open source project single-handedly changing the license, which isn't something you can "just" do even if you wrote 95% of it (even though many small one-line contributions often don't meet the threshold of originality for copyright to apply, it's not so easy to determine where this threshold is, legally speaking, and things can get quite murky rather fast).
It's essentially the same problem Willingham has, where suing D.C. is just too time-consuming and expensive, except that Willingham can choose to sue DC or not, whereas you don't choose if someone sues you or not.
I'm very sympathetic to Willingham's plight and I'd love it if more people would just place things in public domain (or other CC licenses for that matter), but here I'm not sure if he legally can, and even if he could it's murky enough that DC most likely will sue, so practically speaking he can't anyway.
I doubt that he's trying to put stuff he didn't work on into the public domain. This is more like an open source project maintainer relicensing their code and not that of contributors.
Everyone else can now write stories using the characters without worry. Anyone depicting the characters visually will want to make sure that they don't strongly resemble the art that DC presumably still has a copyright on.
I suspect if he got sued that he'd be able to get good legal help either from organizations like the EFF, or with crowdfunding. I'd certainly donate to that.
As I see it this move helps DC since they can now do whatever they want with Fables (make a movie, change characters, etc, etc.) without the author having any say as they also now own it 100% as the author says. At the same time they have enough lawyers to keep everyone else at bay for long enough that it won't matter.
According to the article, their contract still stands as it's legally binding, so DC specifically still needs to abide by it as it can't be unilaterally revoked. But the rest of the world doesn't, so there's loopholes if they do it not as DC but another entity.
And DC can create an LLC which is legally owned by DC but also not legally DC which can do whatever it wants. As I understand it that pretty standard for movies and how Hollywood accounting happens.
What precisely has been gifted to the public domain? As I understand it, Willingham was the writer, not the graphic artist, so the words are his to give away but the finished comic book product is not - is that right?
If he's the "creator" of record, then he can give away characters, setting, plots &c. The words and concepts, as you suggest. So derivative works based on the concepts would be kosher, photocopies of the existing books wouldn't. New art based on old scripts might fly, though my gut instinct says it wouldn't, but rewrites with new art probably would, that sort of thing.
My question is how can he give away a character in a legal sense? Can characters be copyrighted? Mickey Mouse is a Disney Trademark, same with Spiderman and other name-brand 'on the cover' characters.
But what about if I make up a novel and sell it starring the character Peter Parker beat in the match ring in the early aughts film? I say this character is the same character, make up a story of how he recovered from his injury, opened a hot dog launching factory as a novelty theme park, then died of cancer.
The story is set in Earth 616 ostensibly, but I don't use Spider-man beyond that being the past of this main character.
Is that a derivative work? Can you copyright a name/character traits without using trademark law to focus on customer confusion?
EDIT: I think this is laudable what he did, I'm just curious if he even needed to do so in the first place, or if the law already allowed you to do this, in the same way that the Open Gaming License of DND 5E only gave you rights to use the rules system of 5E that copyright law already allowed you to do in the first place?
The current legal status of "Winnie the Pooh" provides examples for all of this.
The original book has entered the public domain and can be reproduced, in whole or in part, by anyone. This includes the characters.
The Disney created works (books, animated, etc.) are still under copyright.
The original Pooh did not wear clothes; the Disney Pooh wears a red shirt. I could write a story based on the original Milne book and it would be legal; if I put Pooh in a red shirt, I would be violating Disney's copyright.
Many of the character names are trademarked by Disney; however, it is not a violation to use those names for new works that are not based on Disney works.
> The original Pooh did not wear clothes; the Disney Pooh wears a red shirt.
Actually, Pooh wears just such a top in chapter three, perhaps because it’s cold, and although all I can actually check at present is https://www.gutenberg.org/files/67098/67098-h/67098-h.htm#CH... which clearly shows it in the original black and white line art, I believe that it was red in colourised versions (though I’m not actually certain when colourisation happened or what its status is).
No, without seeing his contract, you can't know what ownership he retained even if he's nominally the copyright holder. He can be the "copyright holder" of record and have exclusively licensed away the characters, settings, and plots in the contract. He obviously thinks he has not done this, but who is the "creator" of record tells you nothing.
From this perspective it seems like what he is doing by declaring things public domain he is basically calling the bluff of the companies. Whether it is whoever claims to own Elementals or DC, he seems to be hoping that someone will take up his offer and take the companies to court for him.
> What was once wholly owned by Bill Willingham is now owned by everyone
Public Domain IP (USA) is owned by no one. As the preceding line alludes to
> surrendered my Fables property to the public domain
their property rights were surrendered. Now, no one has those rights (which are really the power to restrict other's "rights". copy"rights" are rights of denial, you can't copy, you can't perform, etc.). Meaning the property has returned to its natural state, unrestricted.
Bill's motivations and ideas here seem broadly sane. "Intellectual
property", in all it's manifest forms, no longer serves creators
because most corporations and publishers act as if above the law, in
such disgracefully unethical ways as to make the bargain worthless.
There are honest, small publishers out there, but sadly they're a
dwindling pool.
It is also pleasant to read such a mildly written yet firm account of
"the straw that broke the camel's back". I am very interested in
'thresholds' as part of system dynamics, for example in flocking,
public movements and revolutions. Single actor tipping points such as
Rosa Parks taking a "white" seat are fascinating from a technical,
cultural and systematic view.
I sense we have moved from a general "anti-capitalism" to some even
more powerful latent undercurrents in tech, where disaffection with
big-tech and surveillance capitalism is poised... for what exactly I
don't know. But somewhere out there is a smart, mischievous hacker who
will sow the seminal event. Well done to you Bill Willingham.
> In shorter words, Miss Rosa Parks's decision to stay in a forward seat was the first move in a planned boycott of the bus company and the city law, a campaign organised long before by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and run by a young, bland, handsome black parson, name of Martin Luther King Jr, who while I was in Montgomery, flew in from Atlanta twice a week to buy little vans for use by the boycotters.
On that note, I'll just mention I think that I read a short book called "Mutual Aid" by Dean Spade that really gave me some more ideas for what a world looks like where communities are really taking care of each other and don't have so much emphasis on doing everything yourself.
I didn't downvote and it's not the guidelines[0] but generally hackernews doesn't look kindly upon witty or funny replies and tends to emphasize replies that add spread knowledge and encourage discussion.
TIL the guidelines also say:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Fables is an excellent work of fiction by any metric, not just as a comic. Some of the protagonists are among the most memorable characters in any fictional work. I warmly recommend it to anyone.
Well this is awkward, because after hearing it's in the public domain and reading all these recommendations, I'm interested in reading it, but also knowing that the author doesn't like DC, I don't want to give them money.
Also, DC does have rights to past output, the "new" public domain rights are for the general public to create stories in the universe using the unique creative elements that Willingham formerly retained copyright for, as per his contract.
Willingham and DC are still bound by the contract between them. But, the rest of the world is not. That doesn't mean that DC won't still try to strong-arm anyone who wishes to make their own Fables stories, it just means that Willingham has given the copyrights that he retained as per contract to the general public.
Not the pdfs created by DC. But someone probably can republish Fables, maybe or maybe not using the DC version as a source, and you can download that legally.
Crazy, I used to love Fables. But then I also used to love Vertigo (the "more adult" DC imprint that was closed in 2020 after almost a decade of being killed off slowly) where it used to be published.
> The Fables comic books and graphic novels published by DC, and the storylines, characters, and elements therein, are owned by DC and protected under the copyright laws of the United States and throughout the world in accordance with applicable law and are not in the public domain. DC reserves all rights and will take such action as DC deems necessary or appropriate to protect its intellectual property rights.
If Willingham indeed retains the rights to "storylines, characters, and elements therein", then these clowns are knowingly lying.
DC Comics retains partial rights to the Fables work that they produced. You can make your own work that uses the Fables intellectual property and sell that now.
I'm not an expert on american copyright law at all, but personally I wouldn't touch these ips's. I can only imagine the nightmare of litigation it will bring. Being the "first" on any kind of legal gray area is usually just an enormous waste of time and money. But the decision by this artist to put his work on the public domain, while still under contract with a 3rd party, may create some interesting developments in the future. I just think waiting and seeing is the smarter option.
> Being the "first" on any kind of legal gray area is usually just an enormous waste of time and money.
You quoted "first" correctly: this is not. The concept of placing something in the public domain, is well established. So are its implications.
If a 3rd party goes out to make a movie or something, what's DC Comics going to do? Assert IP rights they don't own, and never have? Prevent someone from using IP that's in the public domain? Sue for breaching a contract that 3rd party doesn't have with them? Good luck with that, and... Streisand.
For a creator this is kind of a nuclear option. But warranted in this case. Well played, mr. Willingham!
Jeff Ryan wrote: I'd love it if in the future this move was commonplace, and known as "The Willingham."
It is safe to say that a major portion of the world population doesn't have any plan to ever travel to the US.
What cannot be controlled however, is the reach of the USA over other countries, extraditions treaties, corruption, exfiltrations, sequestrations and murders.
Also, a lot of copyright law around the world is very close to American copyright law, so what happens outside of the US is anyone's guess. For example, AFAIK, a lot of Soviet cartoons are in a copyright limbo of Russia because they infringe on Disney's (and others') IP [2]
Ah, i get the effect idea/system. Way cheaper for a huge company/conglomerate to uphold all of the laws on the planet so they can operate and earn money everywhere.
Willingham explains his actions a bit more in this post:
I think if people have courage then they will stand up for Willingham and publish their own Fables content.
Easier said than done but if some artists can manage it, the theory is that DC can't sue thousands and thousands of people.
That's what would really make this effective in some way regardless of legal outcomes. For the culture in general to de facto start ignoring DC's claims.
I know we're supposed to be jaded by our past defeats, licking our wounds and cringing at the echoes of naive digital ideas we once thought had legs... I know that he's tricking me into liking him by writing well, with conviction and to the point. I know that it's hopeless now. That the empire has won. I do know these things, but... it's hard for me not to have hope.
Is it really possible that modern culture will all just be owned in one or three portfolios.
So what exactly did Willingham own of Fables? Like, does this mean the books themselves are now free of copyright? Or is it a matter of owning the characters for derivative works?
Edit: his follow-up post says he signed away publishing and adaptation rights to DC... isn't that.... all of the rights?
I didn't see it pointed out but DC is owned by Warner-Discovery (or whatever it is called) so they have tons of lawyers on retainer to prevent anyone from actually publishing Fables but them.
There's also the issue of trademarks which might also prevent people from using the Fables name.
> I didn't see it pointed out but DC is owned by Warner-Discovery (or whatever it is called) so they have tons of lawyers on retainer to prevent anyone from actually publishing Fables but them.
I don't see a way around this:
> The one thing in our contract the DC lawyers can’t contest, or reinterpret to their own benefit, is that I am the sole owner of the intellectual property. I can sell it or give it away to whomever I want.
If he kept full ownership, and I obviously can't see any of his contracts, DC doesn't have any ownership and so can't stop any such publication. It's like how publishing a nice edition of Shakespeare doesn't give that publisher any proprietary rights to Hamlet.
> so they have tons of lawyers on retainer to prevent anyone from actually publishing Fables but them
That's not going to be a long court case regardless of how many lawyers they throw at it, since they would have been unable to produce anything showing that they owned the IP that you are allegedly infringing - because they simply didn't own the IP.
This was true before Willingham pulled this stunt. They never owned it, he did. The only one who could have sued would have been Willingham himself.
With this recent event technically everyone owns it (they too), but bringing that up won't help them at all.
Trademarks: I don't think they should have any, given that you can't trademark something you don't own. Searching trademark databases didn't yield anything.
"The Fables comic books and graphic novels published by DC, and the storylines, characters and elements therein, are owned by DC and protected under the copyright laws of the United States and throughout the world in accordance with applicable law, and are not in the public domain. DC reserves all rights and will take such action as DC deems necessary or appropriate to protect its intellectual property rights."
> The current laws are a mishmash of unethical backroom deals to keep trademarks and copyrights in the hands of large corporations, who can largely afford to buy the outcomes they want.
Succinct but accurate summary of the current state of the law.
Not surprising that the omni-shambles which is WBD (Warner Bros Discovery) continues to hemorrhage any remaining goodwill with the creative community. There is a mandate there to get short term cash flow up to service all the accumulated acquisition leverage and nothing else.
One thing I'm missing from all of this, how was it made public domain? Was there a special post he had to make or some legal document, or is it that substack post itself which is what makes it public domain?
Interesting move, but I think a likely outcome is that nothing happens. In theory other publishers like Marvel are now able to publish Fables content, but why would they? They have their own IP.
> The current laws are a mishmash of unethical backroom deals to keep trademarks and copyrights in the hands of large corporations, who can largely afford to buy the outcomes they want.
I remember other case but may I am writing a big mistake, sorry...the saga gamebooks named Lone Wolf are as something similar to public domain. It is correct?
I don't think so, the author granted Project Aon[0] the license to make them freely available, but they are still his copyright. It's a Free/Libre kind of distinction, IIUC.
Oh, interesting, on a site note, this just gave me an idea, made me think that maybe one of the reasons why boomers think that millennials are lazy is that they don't know that contemporary managers/directors are piece of shit
Why do anything beyond your part of the contract when the other party is doing everything to outmaneuver their part of the same contract, like paying a decent amount of money for instance?
Strange world we live in that the client part of the contract can be more enforced than the company part of the contract, just because everybody is scared to be sued to literal death.
> In my template for radical reform of those laws I would like it if any IP is owned by its original creator for up to twenty years from the point of first publication
I’ve always said that I find it wrong that someone who dedicated their life to finding a cure for a life threatening desease is told: “You get 20 years to turn a profit, then it’s a free for all” yet if someone draws a cute mouse we say: “You get your lifetime, plus 75 years of exclusivity then it’s a gray zone case of which derivatives you own and what you can sue for” (looking at Winnie the Pooh’s red shirt).
You’d think that drawings and written content would be ranked lower than literally curing life threatening deseases and saving lives, when it comes to how long we give the inventors and creators to monetize their creations.
> Mark Buckingham is free to do his version of Fables (and I dearly hope he does). Steve Leialoha is free to do his version of Fables (which I’d love to see). And so on.
Moore has a complicated relationship with Watchmen (and VfV), spurring from his complicated (and constantly changing) relationship with superhero comics. One of his bones of contention with DC is precisely that he didn't want the work to grow offshoots; I doubt he'd want the world to write them freely either.
I don't really understand what the point of this is. The complaints largely seem to be "DC weren't respecting me, so now anyone can do what they want with this". One of the things he complains about is how they wanted to do something, thinking they owned the rights, he said no and then they couldn't do it. But... now they can, because it's now in the public domain.
Actually, all this is ignoring the fact that AFAIK, you can't just revoke copyright and put something into the public domain, you have to explicitly grant a non-exclusive licence to everyone instead. That's why all the CC style licences exist.
Except that now he's put this into the public domain, DC can also do what they want with it to the extent that anyone else can.
It doesn't hurt DC financially, other than potentially diluting the Fable brand because anyone else can also use it now. There's also a strong likelihood that DC do in fact own partial copyright over anything that isn't the comic - so any figurines, film spinoffs, etc., in fact anything that wasn't wholly created entirely by Willingham, even if he still owns the underlying IP, so people almost certainly aren't free to make copies of anything other than just the comics.
Also I don't understand why my comment (the GP to this comment) was been moderated down so much. Is it just that my opinion is unpopular with fans and so it was downvoted rather than debated? For instance, re my comment about public domain vs explicit license there are many articles like this: https://www.techdirt.com/2015/01/23/why-we-still-cant-really...
IANAL obviously, but nothing now stops me from selling T-shirts, figurines and lunchboxes of fable with my own drawings/designs. Any such sale is money not in DC pockets.
Sure, you can make whatever you want from the original designs (but note not from any elements from figurines or films or anything else DC made that deviate from the comics).
However, that in and of itself isn't depriving DC of anything, as they're no worse off financially than if whatever you make never existed. Arguably, if you create something that's a runaway financial success, and someone has to choose between buying your thing and the DC produced thing, then sure maybe then DC loses a sale. But sales are rarely binary like that. If you do something that promotes the brand, it probably benefits DC's sales as well.
The only thing that might actually impact on their profit is someone producing an exact copy of the original comics, at a lower price, and of better quality. Even then, people might still buy the DC version so it matches the rest of their collection. And if it is an exact, exact copy of the original comic, there's always a risk there might be something with a DC copyright on it, e.g. the font that's used in the title, maybe a reference to some other DC property, etc...
https://billwillingham.substack.com/p/more-about-fables-in-t...
Hearing how DC treats comics creators makes me want to boycott their future publications. Thankfully, there are publishers like Image that operate more fairly.