Due to the prevalence of narrow blogs, Brett Thompson modified the default embed size of Mimi & Eunice comics from 640 pixels wide to a mere 560 pixels. Thanks again, Brett!
Everyone: please embed [...]
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Huge thanks to Brett Thompson for adding embed code to Mimi & Eunice! Now they’re easy to share by anyone. Just click “embed this comic,” copy the code that pops up, and paste it in your blog or web page. Use ‘em to illustrate your own articles! Insert ‘em into your arguments! Share ‘em with your [...] So I missed my whole trip to California due to a badly-timed cold. Which means I have lots of time on my hands to bang my head into the wall that is the Mimi & Eunice web site. I hired a developer who started building a beautiful new system in Ruby on Rails, only to discover that [...] Heads up, California peeps! July 20 I’m hosting a screening of Sita Sings the Blues to benefit the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Cartoon Art Museum. Date: Tuesday, July 20, 2010 Address: Delancey Screening room
The next day, July 21, [...] Check out this comic and more on mimiandeunice.com! And they’re embeddable now! Thanks to Mike Caprio for rebuilding the site from scratch. Looking for a specific strip? See thumbnails of the complete archives all at once, or larger strips on the feed page. All comics at mimiandeunice.com link to gigantic high-res PNGs which you can reprint and [...] I’ve been digging through my old original comics archives, selecting artwork for upcoming exhibits at the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum and the Betty Boop Festival in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin. This old gem, while not one of my best, has extra sentimental value. “George the Monster,” who featured in early Nina’s Adventures strips, is [...] Many years ago, I thought “Mimi & Eunice” would be a great name for a comic strip. Recently I’ve been needing to do some drawing just to keep my head from exploding, so this week I figured, why not Mimi & Eunice? As far as I can tell, Mimi & Eunice are two middle-aged children/baby psychos/heterosexual lesbians. That’s all I can surmise so far.
If I use a license, it’ll be one of the 3 Free licenses Creative Commons offers: CC-BY-SA (copyleft) CC-BY (attribution) CC-0 (Public Domain)
The advantage of copyleft is it ensures the work stays Free. Any derivatives must be released under the same terms, so no one can lock it up. It prevents abusive exploitation; no one can monopolize it. The drawback is that keeps it from being used in some projects that use more restrictive licenses. As nasty as restrictive licenses are, they’re still very common, and many worthy projects use them. You can still use a copyleft work within a larger copyrighted work as “Fair Use,” but few are willing to take that risk.
CC-BY (attribution) is compatible with both copyleft and copyright projects, which could conceivably allow the works to spread further. But it still relies on the threat of legal force to ensure attribution. As I wrote recently, attribution has limits that the law might not recognize. Also, I’m intrigued by avoiding legal enforcement as much as possible, and relying on social mores and community ethics to ensure attribution. In fact I already do this with Sita Sings the Blues, but if I want to sue someone for plagiarism or improper attribution, I can. Is that threat really necessary?
Sometimes I think CC-0 (Public Domain) is the most spiritually advanced license. No legal claim to attribution. No legal claim to anything. To put a work in the Public Domain is to totally let it go. That is a turn-on.
Unfortunately many useful Public Domain works are snatched right out of the Public Domain via copyrighted “derivative works”. Take the comic above. If you changed the background color on panel 3 from reddish-gray to lime green, you could say you’ve made a new work and copyright the result. I don’t mind modifications like changing colors, in fact I encourage them; but I abhor monopolies, and the thought of someone then locking up the work in this way is troubling. Certainly the source would remain in the Public Domain. But if someone else modified the source in a similar way, being likewise inspired to change the color of panel 3 to lime green, they could be sued by the jackass that copyrighted his lime-green-panel-3′ed version.
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is in the Public Domain, and technically you can still build on it. But if your “derivative work” too closely resembles Disney’s, they will sue your ass. The laws don’t recognize parallel evolution, nor do the tiny shriveled minds of the corporate executives who wrote them. Thus, although the exact text of Carroll’s original Alice in Wonderland is PD, it’s no longer “free” to build on thanks to corporate monopolies on derivative works.
Much as I want to let go entirely, I fear that could be socially irresponsible. Which also why using no license at all is not really an option. In our world, everything is copyrighted, whether it displays the © symbol or not, whether it’s registered or not, whether it’s attributed or not. Everything is “owned” by someone. Therefore unless something is very clearly marked as Free, it is assumed to be Owned. No license at all would make it impossible for would-be re-users to determine whether the work is legally safe to use.
A friend pointed out that the State gets into everything. Just because I don’t invoke repressive copy restrictions directly, doesn’t mean they don’t affect my work indirectly. Copyright affects everything, whether it’s copyrighted or not. Art is born free, but is everywhere in chains.
Another friend pointed out that my desire to “let go” is still desire. Choosing CC-o/Public Domain to experience the thrill of “selflessness” may actually be more selfish than choosing strong copyleft.
I want my art to stay free. How to achieve that under our current copyright regime, is quite a dilemma. Remember this comic strip Stephen Hersh and I did for King Features Syndicate in 2002 – 2003? Well, we’re releasing ALL of them to EVERYONE under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license! But this project needs your help. I’ve assembled all the strips I could find and put them in two giant zipped folders (one for B&W [...] The Open-Source Coffee Table Book: Publishing Pop Culture in the Digital Age Nina Paley (Nina Paley Productions, LLC) Official blurb: Why should techies have all the fun? The few publishers to embrace open content focus primarily on technical books. But an increasing number [...] Like this isn’t the coolest thing ever: Sita’s first “derivative work”! There she is, in an American Elf comic by James Kochalka! Seeing this comic was a “really so amazing” huge honor for me, and I’m looking forward to seeing more “derivative works” in [...] It’s time to copyleft ALL of my old Nina’s Adventures comics! But the thought of digging through all those old drawings, re-scanning them, cleaning them up in Photoshop and uploading them to archive.org, is more than I can bear. That’s why I’m looking for (a) smart, trustworthy, dedicated volunteer(s) in New York to do it for [...] As an audience member, I too feel obligated to pass on bits of culture I like. So today I’m fulfilling my civic duty by sharing with you [...] Pipe Wrench Fight! Hat tip [...] An ongoing feature in which I recommend the work and websites of people who buy me lunch. Today’s entry: Joan Hilty! Joan Hilty‘s been in comics since the bad old days when I worked in the field. Sexism, stupidity, superheroes on steroids – she’s seen it all. But unlike me, Joan’s not a quitter. Not only is [...] Update: all 10 copies are now sold or spoken for. When I recently visited San Francisco, my best friend Ian picked up the last of my boxes stored at the old apartment I once shared with my ex-husband. Riffling through the contents I discovered a treasure-trove of still shrink-wrapped copies of my first book, Depression Is [...] |
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