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.
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)
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".
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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]
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.
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.
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)?
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
[+] [-] orlandohill|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kmeisthax|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
(Frank Miller at least did more work for DC later, but sadly not at his peak)
[+] [-] a_bonobo|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thrdbndndn|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] at_a_remove|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] autoexec|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] araes|2 years ago|reply
> 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.
From: https://twitter.com/zachrabiroff/status/1702433264458248218
"Three subsequent copyright filings list the copyright holder as Willingham, with DC's copyright transferred by written agreement."
Bill Willingham is listed as: "Authorship: text" DC Comics, employer for hire is listed as: "Authorship: artwork"
DC Comics is also listed as contact for: "Rights and Permissions"
From: https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/9035/ownership-of-wo...
> 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.).
[+] [-] toyg|2 years ago|reply
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.
It's so sad, because it's all so unnecessary.
[+] [-] me_again|2 years ago|reply
Not making excuses for DC, btw.
[+] [-] phreack|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prewett|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] LegitShady|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbork_pl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ta8645|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bmacho|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jzb|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ipsin|2 years ago|reply
The world is based on the public domain (fairytale characters) but with many interesting touches, set in the modern world.
[+] [-] TRiG_Ireland|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] oaiey|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ateng|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoMoreNicksLeft|2 years ago|reply
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?
That's what this guy is doing.
[+] [-] sokoloff|2 years ago|reply
What part of this is not already the case for microwave ovens?
[+] [-] derangedHorse|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ptman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelbuckbee|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] catapart|2 years ago|reply
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!
Fantastic work here, Bill! Thank you!
[+] [-] loughnane|2 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] tetris11|2 years ago|reply
This could be abused in an infinite loop. There should be a max resell limit of 2
Edit: I should learn to read. Indeed it cannot be resold.
[+] [-] xiaq|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] egypturnash|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dspillett|2 years ago|reply
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!).
[+] [-] BasilPH|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] omega3|2 years ago|reply
“[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]
[0] https://www.lawcatalog.com/media/productattach/l/j/ljp_694pu...
[+] [-] prmoustache|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tanepiper|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fsloth|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LocalH|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Chilinot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tanepiper|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinmchugh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SonOfLilit|2 years ago|reply
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)?
[+] [-] arp242|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jl6|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jccalhoun|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] njharman|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cwkoss|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Semaphor|2 years ago|reply