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In the Land of the Free, Who Controls the Content?

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 at 9:45 am by Jamie

Captain Copyright

At this past weekend’s Harvey Awards at the Baltimore Comic Con, Mark Waid delivered a heartfelt wake-up call to the print comics industry. Now since this is third, fourth, fifth hand since I wasn’t at the show, I can only base my assumptions of Waid’s main point from the various reports online. If I understand correctly, Waid intimated that protecting your ideas is not as important as profiting from them. It doesn’t sound like he was advocating piracy, but since this age of internet has made everything free, time would be better spent figuring out how to make money off of rather than jealously guarding our ideas.

I can imagine the gasps in the room from traditional publishers who depend on their copyrighted characters for licensing revenue and such. But for us webcomic folks, this is old news.

It is absolutely essential for artists to use the internet to promote their work. The catch is that as soon as you put something online, someone is going to steal it. You could spend ages trying to find new ways to prevent digital piracy, but you’ll never really deter the practice nor really stop it. That’s not to say that there’s no value in copyright. But it’s time to start thinking differently about our ideas. Creative Commons is a forward thinking licensing standard that responds well to the digital download era and it has benefited many artists. It gives would-be pirates a legal means to download and remix content while protecting the rights of the content creator.

Creative Commons is a good start. And it’s groups like these who provide these forward thinking tools that will help ween us off traditional notions of copyright protection that may be too antiquated to respond to a modern sensibility. I think Mark Waid was incredibly brave for sounding the call and I think once the dust settles a bit, the print comic industry might actually start moving forward along with the rest of us.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 at 9:45 am and is filed under Art, Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  • http://duagcore.wordpress.com/ Cortharis

    “It is absolutely essential for artists to use the internet to promote their work. The catch is that as soon as you put something online, someone is going to steal it.”

    I don’t think the history of ‘art theif’/replication has ever been restricted to just the internet. Case in point I went to Taiwan back in 2008, and while there met a guy who created art works and jewellery from colourful bent wire and such. He had awesome creations like the Preditor, T-100, the Alien, all in this original style.

    In the same trip a few days later I was in a market in Thailand looking at the same stuff, in two differnet markets as well. The guy in Taiwan got a lot of press for his work, but to be honest I could not say who was copying whom in this case.

    Maybe artists should be less anal about protecting their work, maybe they should worry less about profiteering as best as they can. Instead maybe as artists we would best serve ourselves with finding a niche, fill it for a bit and move on.