Two things...

You can't copyright a character. You can copyright a work a character appears in. You have to trademark a character.

Second, Time / Warner is an isp. They own one of the larget cable networks in the country. Which has added broadband connections to their product line. Aside from content, the cable network is the primary reason AOL was interested in the merger. Their previous network was dial-in only.



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Justin Savage
President/Editor/Web-bozo
www.sabresedge.com

I'm sure this is a technological possibility. Whether it's an economic/business-methods possibility I just don't know.



This is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. These sites are like web design portfolios. They do amazing outrageous stuff, and try to publicize it in various ways, and that gets them straight-ahead contract work. They are selling their skills and their labor, and their website is an advertisement for that. Which takes us to the next sentence...



Well yeah, SURE! If you put up a site doing really good mainstream-style comics, and try to promote the site to the big comic houses, that's basically setting up a virtual portfolio review. It's like posting a resume (which is how I got my day job, they saw mine on my site). However, there is one problem; if you drew a Batman story and put it up, it's possible that they could sue you for infringing on their trademark -- because you're posting it publicly. All the big companies say, "hey, draw some pages with our characters and send them in to us!" as a way to maybe get some work from them, but I don't know how they'd react to anyone doing the same thing and posting the pages for the whole world to see.

But doing that is just making your portfolio public. That's a good thing though!



OK, now this I agree with, but it's a big sticking point with a lot of artists. In my opinion, if you go work for Marvel, drawing Spider-Man or whatever, you are being hired as a skilled craftsman to "manufacture" a product -- just like a skilled woodworker would be hired to build high-quality furniture or cabinets. The craftsman gets paid an hourly or per-piece wage to turn out the work. In my day job, I'm hired as an illustrator and web designer, which to me is the same. My company pays me a salary, and I use my skills to turn out work for them. I've done a bunch of illustrations and created logos for some sub-products on our site. It's all work-for-hire, I get no royalties nor do I control usage on any of it. I have no problem with that, because in return I get a nice steady paycheck, benefits, and options (the value of which is incumbent on the success of the company -- to which I try to contribute in the interests of upping that value).

I get the idea that (and please don't hesitate to correct me if I'm wrong here, gang) that many comic artists feel that if they are drawing someone else's comics, that they are in some sense "creating" or "re-creating" the characters, and that they should be paid as if they were in fact creators of the work. But to me, this is like hiring a landscaping firm to execute a design for your yard -- for which you paid a landscape architect -- and then having the landscaper demand a fee equal to that of the architect ON TOP of the cost of the labor. Or, if I wrote a song and hired studio musicians to help me record it, and then they demanded publishing and sales royalties on top of their union-mandated session fees.

Yep, I know I just pissed a lot of people off. I'm really not trying to cut into your living, folks, but working as a commercial artist is more about selling your skills and labor than selling your creativity. I realize it's a very fine line; however the reality out here in the real world is that graphic designers and commercial illustrators routinely just create what the customer wants from them and get paid a fee for it. Yes, there are provisions for usage rights in most cases (especially for illustrators) and even for royalties in some cases. But for the most part it's like putting together a table to a customer's specifications, for which they pay you, and then they take the table home and use it to put stuff on. The people who designed the new FedEx logo and corporate look got paid a fee, and that's it. It was a BIG-ASS fee, but they don't get a royalty for every envelope and airplane and uniform the logo goes on. Some would argue that it's still "ART."

The difference or step up from that in drawing stuff is that you're not just hired for your skill and professionalism, but for your STYLE. Hopefully, it's for your UNIQUE style; more often it seems it's for your ability to "draw just like ___________ (insert trendy artist here)", at least as far as the majors go. Obviously, your style can be highly valuable and make you more desirable (and higher-paid!) than just straight skills -- that's why Jeff "Skunk" Baxter gets paid more than Joe Schmoe, Session Guitarist; his personal style makes him more valuable. HE doesn't get royalties from his session work (unless he's a writer on the song), even though he's adding value to the product through his uniqueness? What would make any artist think they are different from this?

Of course, if you ARE the creator of something, you certainly should be getting paid MORE than if you're just turning out the finished product of someone else's ideas.

Ugh, it's all so muddy when you get into the issues of what is "creative" art and what is "skilled labor" art. I mean, a sign painter is definitely doing "skilled labor," but it's a bit more fuzzy when you look at a comic book artist drawing someone else's comic. And when you look at writing, it's even muddier. Nat writes "Idiot's Guides" for various things, which would appear to me to be of the "skilled labor" variety -- definitely not concocting and telling a story -- but does he get royalties for that, or just straight compensation, and if so/not, why/why not? Probably none of my business and I apologize for asking.

Anyway, I know I'm getting a bit far afield in my stream-of-consciousness sort of way, but this is all pertaining to the motivations of WHY we think we should get paid for every copy of our work, and indeed WHY we do what we do in the first place -- and WHY we feel entitled to get paid for creating -- or more precisely, for telling/showing our ideas to other people -- in the first place, which has a great deal to do with what all the hoo-raw is about on this copyright stuff.

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Jeff Zugale
Pagan City Comics
www.pagancity.com

Well hush my mouth. So, does trademark have a lifespan as well? Does it have to be renewed?

If the copyright ended for Disney, then what exactly would have been made public? The actual movies the characters appeared in? So, people would have been allowed to show them for free? Now I'm confused about exactly what that would have meant.

Damn. Thanks Savage.

My understanding is that the work is made public. As far as I know, a trademark can be renewed pretty much forever as long as the company that uses it defends it and uses it as a trademark.

How long has Coca Cola been in business? They've had that trademark the whole time.

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Justin Savage
President/Editor/Web-bozo
www.sabresedge.com




[This message has been edited by savage (edited 10-18-2000).]

I've noticed a tendency (just a tendency, not a hard'n'fast rule) for this to be a dividing line between artists and writer-only creators... and that makes sense. The sheer quantity of time each is involved makes the situation very different. Writers can turn out a lot more concepts than folks who have to do the full art can, and a long-running project is likely to be an artist's only project during that time. So Batton Lash has to be very careful with the rights to Wolff & Byrd; they're his only major creative property of the past decade, and if the subsidiary rights end up in hands that aren't that concerned with doing something with them, he's out of luck. Meanwhile, I'm about to do a graphic novel for a company that is interested in grabbing up film rights to a lot of projects; if they just sit on it and don't generate any money, that's only a couple of months out of my life and such are the gambles we take. If things are going well for me, I'll be taking several such gambles each year.
At which point, it wouldn't be P2P. In fact, it would basically be like the subscription channels that MP3.com has already put together.
They don't have to be worried about that far in the future. They're worried about things that would quickly go PD if the law were not changed.
Not quite true. There have been rulings that indicate that copyright can apply to characters when that character effectively embodies a story.

On my computer books, as I've mentioned before, I've done both flat-fee and advance-against-royalties work. I would say there is some creativity in it; while there are certain aspects that have to fit their form, the entire detectable nature of the item is not preset. This makes it different than car assembly, where your goal is to have each car created be indistinguishable. It's more like car design, where you need to meet certain standards but have room for freedom within it. (For me, the amount of freedom varies on various computer books; the Idiot's Guide, with their openness to humor, makes a good fit for me.)
--Nat (who is back but hectic, and may not answer quickly)

Like I said, I'm a bit sketchy on rulings and such. I'm only going by the information at the feds trademark/copyright website.

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Justin Savage
President/Editor/Web-bozo
www.sabresedge.com

Hey Nat, welcome back! I trust your honeymoon was blissful and restful! [img]http://209.198.111.165/ubb/smile.gif[/img]



Oh yes definitely, a writer can churn out idea after idea and story after story in relatively little time. Tell me, do you think it's easier to hand such work off to others, who are interested in doing the visual or audio-visual work? I guess if you're a writer, as opposed to a writer/artist or writer/director or the like, you might not really be interested in being involved in the production of the extrapolation of your work into other media -- as long as you get paid up front and royalties later.

Being a visual person and wanting to be involved in the visual product, that's totally different. Hard to hand off your art to someone else and hope you'll get paid for it. And artists get crapped on a lot... just read that McFarlane/Gaiman post over in News.

I think you may be a bit off the mark there. Sure writers (as a group) are interested in being involved in the adaptations of their works. However, the comic book non-artist writer is accustomed to collaboration. We have to hand off scripts to other hands all the time, so we have to develop less fear about having someone else messing around with "our" work. And in my personal case, I've seen people who have been too emotionally involved in the adaptations of their work, which is a hard thing to deal with when you suddenly have much less control over the end product. I make the conscious choice not to emotionally invest myself in adaptations of my work outside their originally intended medium -- and I suspect that I'm not the only one. So if The Factor ever becomes a TV series, I'd hope it would be good, and sure it'd be fun to write a couple of scripts for it... but you'll never hear me ranting about how they ruined my comic. My comic is done, it's in print, it's too late for them to mess with it.
If you assume that comic book writers are not visual people, then I would say that you're underestimating them. Just because we ain't renderers doesn't mean that we don't have to think visually to do what we do.
Ummm, isn't that thread largely about an artist crapping on a writer?

[This message has been edited by NatGertler (edited 10-21-2000).]

I once again hang my head in blushing shame. I really need to drink more caffeine or something, I think my brain is starting to calcify on me...

Nat, I have a question (and others are welcome to answer of course). If you were offered a steady salaried job, at a good rate of pay and with all usual benefits, writing for a living -- i.e. a regular day job just like anyone else's except doing something you like to do -- would you take it, if doing so meant that you would never get advances or royalties for that work, but that you would have a comfortable living and predictable work hours and all that? Granted that doing so would never make you instantly rich. However you'd still have your off time to write other stuff.

Same question to you artists: if you were paid an appropriate wage -- say, $75,000/year, similar to what skilled architects, engineers, art directors, etc. make -- would you go draw comics 40-45 hours a week? Hypothetically of course... and this would include all health benefits, the 9-5 type predictable schedule. I guess if you were new you'd start for less of course, like around $35,000/year and build up.

But still, if there was a "career path" that was more like anyone else's job... wouldja?

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Jeff Zugale
Pagan City Comics
www.pagancity.com