Keskustelujen arkisto

snip
> . As to "LTBs" haven't got a clue

Abbreviation for `Lustige Taschenbuecher' - one format in which
Disney stuff is published in Germany.

G.Heinlein

> (maybe some German Internet or duck insider
> abbreviation...)?

> From: Antonio Svevi [mailto:robert662 at caramail.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2000 6:39 PM

>>> In all European comics I know of, authors get paid
>>> every time one of their stories is reprinted, in any
>>> country.

> Asterix, Lagaffe, and countless other non Disney comics are
> owned by their real authors.

Many others are owned by their original creators. While the newer stories
are made by others. For instance Bob & Bobette (Vandersteen), Tintin
(Herg?), Tom Poes (Toonder).
Very much like the Disney case, except that mr. Disney did very few comics
himself.

--Harry.
"Hm." (Tom Poes)

Hi,

Two weeks ago Amy and I got married on Friday October 13th (we met online on
the X-Files newsgroup). Our wedding day was great. From this mailing list I
had invited Harry Fluks, Daniel van Eijmeren and Frank Jonker (Duco Feenstra
unfortunately couldn't make it). What they brought as a gift together was
truely amazing.

They had made an extremely heavy money bin (about 15 inches tall), made of
white plaster and filled with coins!!! Accompanied was a one-page story
written by Frank (writer of many stories for the Dutch Donald Duck Weekly).
In the story the Beagle Boys had miniturized the money bin to give it as a
gift to our wedding. We had to open the money bin from the bottom with a
hammer to get the money out, just like the Beagle Boys would break it open.
Luckily we managed to keep the money bin in one piece.

Very cute was that inside - inbetween all the Dutch nickels, dimes and
quarters - we found one "lucky" dime of the year 2000 in a small plastic
box. ;o)

We noticed that there is a dollar sign drawn on the front. Isn't Harry
always saying that the currency sign of the country should be on it? That
would have been an F for Dutch guilders. But then again, Amy is from the US.
;o)

Thanks again for this great gift guys, it is really cool.

Greetings,

Arthur de Wolf
Rotterdam - the Netherlands
Disney Comics Worldwide: http://www.wolfstad.com/dcw

Well, you can't complain that the list is boring anymore, eh? In some ways this is going to sound like a personal attack, but I assure you it is not. I'm responding to the ideas present, not the person.

Stefan:
"It's like some people believe that just because they own a computer, they have a right to get
everything else in the world for free."

What computers, and the internet, have done are to make it possible for people to share information (even information with full color pictures and sound) with each other for free. All modern revolutions begin with some technological breakthrough. The protestant revolution could never have happened without the printing press (which enabled average people to afford and read the bible, who
previously had to accept the word of Catholic priests as to its contents.) The industrial revolution could not have happened without the invention of steam powered mechanical production. Copyright law has its roots in 18th century printing presses. There is no way it will withstand the pressures of the internet age.

"On this list, I've been amazed to see people continuously advertising fully
scanned Disney stories for anyone to read or download. An illustrated fan site
is one thing, and should be applauded if it's well maintained, yet I
thought it should be obvious to anyone that complete stories are way too much. I've been
wondering how they can to this and why somebody doesn't stop them, or even
politely tell them this is a thoughtless thing to do."

Don't forget that under the strict letter of copyright law, and illustrated fan site is NOT acceptable. Lucas Arts, when internet usage first started exploding, actually tried to shut down every fan site it could find. That turned into a fruitless enterprise. Try this experiment: make a fanzine and liberally illustrate it with Disney copyrighted chracters and images, then mail a copy of
it to Disney and see what they say. They forbade John Nichols from using them in the Barks Collector, and that was a quasi scholarly fanzine. Posting a full story is not a thoughtless act, and your suggestion that it is seems rather insulting and condescending. Here's something to think about: I remember in the 1960s kids in our neighborhood would get a comic, read it, and pass it on
to their friends. Every individual comic sold was ready by a hundred different kids or more. Were they breaking the copyright law? In many ways, the internet is a virtual playground.

"Tomorrow I'll walk into the jewellers' and take a diamond
bracelet. I'm not gonna sell it, so I'm not making a profit from it. I'm
giving it to my girlfriend, who wouldn't have bought it otherwise, and the store has
lots of other bracelets anyway, so nobody loses anything. Yes, this situation
is different, but the argument is the same. And how about this: "The Internet
is a free medium. Nobody can stop us, so we can do whatever we want." (Or
similar.) Well, this is very, very na?ve at best."

This is a sloppy argument and not at all the same. No one is suggesting that you walk into a store and steal a comic off the shelf. In that case, the comic is a physical product, just like a box of soap or a woven rug. But your argument shows how little you understand the information age. The comic "book" is a product. But what is it really? There were tens of thousand comic books
printed in the 40s and 50s, but you don't find fan sites devoted to very many of them. Yet the Barks stories are collected and shared all over the world. Why? Because of their content. The ideas in them. The characters and stories, all unique to Carl Barks. Without the ideas and imagination of a creator like Barks, the comic book is just so much paper: the publisher has nothing to
publish, the printer has nothing to print, the distributor has nothing to distribute, the bookstore has nothing to sell, and yes, the translator has nothing to translate.

The fact that an average person can scan a full color image, post it to a website, and have it instantly available to millions of other people, bypassing all those people, is revolutionary, not naive, very or otherwise.

"Otherwise, it wouldn't be hard to think of several other, less
flattering attributes for people with this kind of opinions. "Dangerous" would
be one of the more neutral."

Revolutions are only "dangerous" to those profiting from the status quo.

"But, as has been pointed out, and needs to be pointed out again: Information and art is not the same thing, I repeat NOT the same thing. Granted, the boundaries may be blurry at times, but
most of the time it should be pretty clear-cut what one could do or not. And publishing complete Disney comic stories is a very clear "not". I think it's outrageous!"

The world of ideas is the world of ideas, I see no distinction between art and information.

"Finally: John Garvin's vision of the future really scares me. I'm not prophet
enough to tell whether it will come true or not, but I believe, for reasons
stated many times recently by wise contributors to this list, that we all
would
do well to try to prevent it for as long as we could. Ah well, so far, so bad.
But when John says things like:
>
> It is a human
> right to break a bad law. If enough people do it, the laws get swept away.

I even get scared of the man himself. From such convictions stem movements
that
I don't want to discuss on this list, or anywhere else, for that matter. I
can't believe that John deep down inside really means that, and wants to
preach
the message to others. Hopefully, he just enjoys some rhetoric drama. Why,
some
of the other things he says actually makes good sense to me! But if he does
mean what he says above... well, I can only hope that none of his friends ever
get into their heads that any law protecting my personal safety is a bad one."

What I'm about to say may sound controversial and offensive, so fair warning.

I mean exactly what I say: It is a human right, moreover, a human responsibility, to break bad laws. Perhaps you are afraid because you don't trust people to know the difference between bad laws and good ones. I have more faith than that. I'm not sure what "movements" you are talking about, but modern history is full of examples of bad laws and bad governments being overturned by
people who were not afraid to break the law:

Nelson Mandella spent almost his entire life in prison in South Africa because he refused to follow the unjust laws of Apartheid. Yes I'm sure there were many wealthy whites in position of power who were afraid about the revolutionary changes that happened in that country.

Martin Luther King spent much of his life in jail because he refused to obey the unjust Jim Crow laws of the American South. Yes I'm sure there were many wealthy whites in position of power who were afraid about the revolutionary changes that happened in the south.

How many people were persecuted by the unjust laws of Stallinist Russia, Nazi Germany, Communist East Germany, Zionist Israel, Milosovich's Yugoslavia? You may think I'm exaggerating by equating these copyright issues with such great dramas of the human struggle for equality, but I think they are related, on two levels:

First, it is fear of "the law" that allows such unjust laws to flourish. You are not afraid of John Garvin "the man" you are afraid of upsetting the status quo. It is people like you who "look the other way" when the rights of others are abused that allowed regimes like those in South Africa to exist, and others like the Facism to sweep across Eastern and Western Europe, people who were
to cowardly to stand up for what was right, or who were profiting from the system and didn't want to see it fail.

Second, it is the control of information that makes these human abuses so easy. The first thing a despotic government tries to do when it comes to power is take over the printing presses, TV stations, radio airwaves so they can control access to information. The internet represents the free access to all information.

Media corporations have had it pretty good until now. They could pay artistic geniuses starvation wages while they reaped millions from their labor. The comic publishing industry is especially guilty of this:

a. How much money do you think Carl Barks made for Western Publishing and the Disney Corporation? Carl saw none of this until he started doing oil paintings in his 70s and 80s, and Disney even tried to take that away from him.

b. How much money did Superman make National Periodicals? Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel died in near poverty.

c. How much money did Dan DeCarlo make Harvey Publications? They just fired him for standing up for his claim to characters he created.

d. How much money have the various publishers of Don Rosa's "Life of Scrooge" stories made? How much of that does Don get? None.

While such exploitation is certainly legal, it is NOT moral or right. And corporations who routinely exploit others certainly do not get sympathy from me when they use an army of lawyers to protect intellectual property they have "stolen" in the first place. An information revolution is coming. Your blind fear of it, won't stop it.

And for the record: I don't think anyone on this list is "thoughtless" or "naive" or particularly "dangerous." Such name calling is not conducive to the free exchange of ideas.

JOHN GARVIN says:

Media corporations have had it pretty good until now. They could pay
artistic geniuses starvation wages while they reaped millions from their
labor. The comic publishing industry is especially guilty of this:

a. How much money do you think Carl Barks made for Western Publishing and
the Disney Corporation? Carl saw none of this until he started doing oil
paintings in his 70s and 80s, and Disney even tried to take that away from
him.

b. How much money did Superman make National Periodicals? Joe Shuster and
Jerry Siegel died in near poverty.

c. How much money did Dan DeCarlo make Harvey Publications? They just fired
him for standing up for his claim to characters he created.

d. How much money have the various publishers of Don Rosa's "Life of
Scrooge" stories made? How much of that does Don get? None.

While such exploitation is certainly legal, it is NOT moral or right. And
corporations who routinely exploit others certainly do not get sympathy from
me when they use an army of lawyers to protect intellectual property they
have "stolen" in the first place.

============================================================================
===

AND I REPLY:

I've watched this debate with interest, though I take no stand on the
legality of copyright laws as they now exist. I avoid involvement, not out
of the fear John speaks of, but because it really doesn't affect me
personally (for now).

But I do feel the urge to insert one more factor in the case for change.
The laws as they exist (at least as far as they concern Disney comics) don't
keep Don Rosa and others from collecting royalties. The publishing
companies do. Because Disney claims the right to all artists' work, then
sells publishing rights to Egmont, et. al., those companies now have the
ability to reproduce the work royalty-free.

That doesn't mean the companies CAN'T pay the creators royalties. It means
they are not legally (until the court says different) REQUIRED to do so. If
the publishers were nice folks and willing to share the 3 cubic acres of
cash they have accumulated from repeated issues of "free" material, they
could pay the authors and artists any royalty they fell they can afford.

Instead, they make a conscious decision NOT to. Disney says they don't have
to pay royalties, but Disney cannot tell the publishers how to spend their
money. They can put the artist on the payroll just as easily as they do the
printer and the accountant (and the lawyer). They have simply chosen to
cheap out because Disney says they can. Is Disney the Evil Empire of Greed?
I'm not about to make a public statement on that count. But Disney has lots
of help from people who could be making a difference the other way.

I suspect we will see the shakeup John has been talking about thanks to
Napster and the fan sites on the Web. Good or bad, it looks like this
freight train is going to be impossible to stop. Whether it is going to
benefit the artists in any way is anyone's guess.

Dan Shane -- taking a firm stand on impartial prejudice (figure that one
out, if you can)

dan wrote

<<a. How much money do you think Carl Barks made for Western Publishing and
the Disney Corporation? Carl saw none of this until he started doing oil
paintings in his 70s and 80s, and Disney even tried to take that away from
him.>>

Actualy Western did have a profit-sharing plan in the early 1950s, I'm
told...(I could have been told wrong).

<<b. How much money did Superman make National Periodicals? Joe Shuster and
Jerry Siegel died in near poverty.>>

Thanks to Neal Adams and bad publicity, Warner Communications gave Shuster
and Siegel a pension from the time of the first Superman movie till their
deaths.
The poverty was prior to that.

<< c. How much money did Dan DeCarlo make Harvey Publications? They just
fired
him for standing up for his claim to characters he created.>>

That would be Archie. The harvey comics ended and most were sold years ago.

Steven Rowe

hi,

Some very interesting discussion about copyright, law, corporations,
morale and ethics has been going on here. Normally I'm a lurker, just
breezing through the digest every now and then, but over the last week I
have been reading it with increasing interest.

Copyright and related issues (DeCSS, DMCA, Napster) have been hotly
discussed in the public eye. Having followed these discussions on several
different forums I must say that the postings on this list represent some
of the more well spoken arguments in this debate, while at the same time
they didn't include anything notably new or especially thought provoking.

What usually confuses people is the word "free". Freedom of Speech (or
Information if you wish) does not mean free as in "free beer". Quotes like

>>"What computers, and the internet, have done are to make it possible for
people to share information (even information with full color pictures
and sound) with each other for free."

refer obviously to the cost of accessing the internet and transferring
information. However, they don't concern themselves with to the actual
freedom of the information (eg. are they allowed to freely distribute the
information).

Freedom of speech is in itself a difficult concept and more so when
applied to eg. computer code (DeCSS) or art. Often it is censored by local
government and many laws regulate it (libel, slander, hate, child-porn).
These laws are in place to make sure that the freedom of one person
doesn't intrude on the rights of another.

"Freedom of information" is a term coined in similarity to the
constitutional right regarding speech. It is mostly used when one wants to
indicate that information (ideas, computer programs and files, generally
anything one can move through the 'net) should be regarded as speech, and
as such, one should be allowed to post eg. the source of a computer
programm on the internet since one would equally be allowed to read it out
loud to a friend for example.

>>"I remember in the 1960s kids in our neighborhood would get a comic,
read it, and pass it on to their friends. Every individual comic sold
was ready by a hundred different kids or more. Were they breaking the
copyright law?

This comment illustrates the problem. They weren't breaking the law back
then, but what about if one of the kids would have had a printing press
(for whatever odd reason) and made exact copies for every kid on the
block (or rather in the city or the world)?

When one talks about Freedom of information one has to realize that
copyright regulates this freedom just like libel, slander etc. laws
regulate free speech. The internet has made the proliferation of
hate-texts and child-pornography virtually effortless, yet no-one is
crying for an abandonment of the laws or, for that matter, thinking that
the laws will simply dissapear over time.

Copyright for some reason gets a totally different treatment from people.
It seems that the over all lack of respect for copyright law isn't a
consequence of any general loss of morality (see previous paragraph),
rather I think it is simply greed or envy or hate. Stories of heartless
megacorporations and their inhuman tactics make it all so much easier
(even right) to steal from them. Does it make it any less a crime however?

>>"It is a human right, moreover, a human responsibility, to break bad
laws."

In a democratic society personal freedom is individually the most
cherished right, however, it never extends so much as to invade the
rights of another person. With personal freedom comes the responsability
to respect the rights of others, not the responsability to trample all
over their rights just because you have a reason ("it is a bad law").

The way to get rid of a bad law is to go vote, write your representative,
write in the newspapers etc. Civil disobedience (the willfull and
exemplatory breaking of a law) is always the last resort in a democratic
society. The fact that with the internet it has become the most easy
method does not mean it should be the first one to resort to. If you don't
believe that then you don't believe in democracy (which then in itself
gives rise to a rather involved discussion).

To close up I should say that, having followed copyright issues online, I
knnow that Di$ney has been quite ignorant of the web and what goes on in
it, just go to ebay and look for illegal DVD's of disney movies being sold
there, or more obviously look at the hundreds of online disney comics. How
long this will continue, however, is anyones guess.

I strongly believe that in the absence of law enforcement (by Di$ney or
anyone) one should still try to do the right thing.

-Timo Ruppell

John Garvin:

Obviously, I don't agree with everything you say. With some of it, yes, but
looking through your recent posts, it actually seems I more or less
strongly disagree with most of your ideas. Even so, I still can't predict
the future. It may very well be that you are right and I am wrong. Which is
what scares me. Not the fact that I'm wrong... I'm certainly used to
that... but some of the consequences of such a future, with all copyright
law abolished as well as other things, do bother me. Well, well. Time will
tell.

Many of these issues will drift off-topic if we beat them too long and
hard. Let's see if I can repeat or clarify my views on the stuff that's
most pertinent to the Disney Comics discussion. I still definitely maintain
that there should be a distinction between art and information, and I might
add another important distinction that shows much of the core of the
copyright laws: that between private use and public. That's why it is OK to
lend comics to your friends in the schoolyard. And I don't think many music
companies will react if I tape a copy of some favorite record to a friend,
but they will if I advertise it in the papers. I believe the law has two
important points in cases such as these: you can't make money from it AND
you can't make it public. Again, there will always be cases where the
boundaries are fuzzy - private or public? For example, I might host a poker
game in my home for some friends in an area where public gambling is
illegal. That might be fine, but if I rent a room somewhere especially for
this, letting in more people and charging them to join the game, I might be
breaking the law.

Gee, I got off-topic again. Fancy that. Anyway, basically, you can tape
music, play poker, lend out comics and probably even scan them in private
IF and ONLY IF you don't make money from it. In public, you can't do it at
all. I think that's a very reasonable law, and something we all should
honor. That's the way it works in the democratic society in which I live.
Now, I've been fortunate enough never to have had to live under another
system. If I had, I can't tell whether I might see things differently, but
as it is, I'm happy and proud that I don't.

So to me, it's still common sense that putting a complete story, to which
you don't own the rights, to the public eye is an obvious misdeed. Then
again, I'm an old-fashioned guy... maybe common sense isn't that common
anymore...

I'll also repeat that I haven't said anything to defend Disney's methods,
legally or morally. I'm not particularly interested in that company, and it
does many things that annoy me. I vividly remember the case you mention of
American Disney fanzines like The Barks Collector, and it strongly upset me
how Disney could enforce the prohibition of the fair use of
illustration/quotations rights. That was outrageous to me! I remember how
we told ourselves it could never happen in our country... we hoped, at least.

>Try this experiment: make a fanzine and liberally illustrate it with
Disney copyrighted chracters and images, then mail a copy of
>>it to Disney and see what they say.

We did just that in the late 70's (before the Barks Collector incident). My
friends and I were starting a fanzine and wanted to respect the law, so we
walked up to Disney, who had an office in Stockholm at the time. Of course
they wouldn't give us written permission to use any illustrations, but they
also made it clear "between the lines" that they wouldn't mess with us as
long as we didn't do anything really wrong. The fanzine is bigger now, and
I'm not as much involved in it as I used to be, but we still try to make a
point of not abusing the illustration right that the law does allow us...
much like The Barks Collector, although it got unjustly busted.

At times, someone asks us, "Why couldn't you print this or that story in
the fanzine so everyone can read it?" And the answer is easy: "Because we
are not allowed to." The Disney Archives in Burbank has copies of all our
issues, and we gladly keep sending the new ones, irregularly as they might
appear. We wouldn't want anyone over there get the idea that we abuse their
rights. They could tell us to cease and desist at any time, and if we did
things like publish whole stories, they would be quite right in doing so.

So even though I may not agree with everything Disney does, I see no point
in trying to make enemies with it. And once again I advise any keepers of
serious fan sites to adopt a similar view. If Disney tries to stop one fan
site, it might want to stop them all. We are all in jeopardy here. Getting
banned and keeping appearing somewhere else doesn't solve anything. In a
way, I hope that Disney's people actually read this list and check out the
sites, and come to the obvious conclusion that they are a good thing for
everybody and don't need to be intervened against.

And, John, I really don't want to hold anything personal against you,
either. You are a Duck lover! You can't be all that bad! With few
exceptions, the Donaldists I've met are warm, funny, intelligent, sociable,
peaceful people, a breed from which the vast majority of my closest friends
have emerged. In fact, the qualities of the people involved is one of the
main reasons I still want to be an active Duck fan. I don't want to think
that you are any different, and you certainly express your ideas well.

When you say:

>Perhaps you are afraid because you don't trust people to know the
difference between bad laws and good ones.

you are obviously correct. If I knew you better, I might be more convinced
that you can make this distinction more or less along the same lines as me.
But I would hardly ever encourage you to break any laws, and I sure
wouldn't trust just about anyone in the world to decide for me when to
break a law because they think the law is "bad". Spreading and encouraging
this notion is repulsive to me. It can lead to... well, as I said, not only
is it off-topic, but I also don't want to discuss it. If I did, someone
might end up thinking I've called you a terrorist, which is far from what I
think of you personally or anyone else on this list.

So maybe it's not you I'm scared of, but of some of the people that might
listen to you. Also, if I didn't think so much about it, maybe I wouldn't
be so scared of the future either.

I've seen the future, brother
And it's murder!
--- Leonard Cohen

Peace, Ducks and happiness,

Stefan Dios
Malmo, Sweden