Willingham sends Fables into the public domain
billwillingham.substack.com
billwillingham.substack.com
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.
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
(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.
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.
IP vs Concrete Creation using that IP
There's certainly a lot of gray area left on the artwork, especially. DC probably owns most of it? It might take a lot of work to track down the original artists and find their thoughts on all this.
At face value based on what Willingham seems to believe, you could probably remix the early comics, use the dialog word for word, maybe even panel for panel. But you'd probably need to use entirely new artwork and be very careful that the artwork is entirely new with fresh concepts.
But there's a fun twist there given how much of Fables is itself based on older public domain works and arguments that many of the core concepts of the characters have always been public domain and even very close artwork may be entitled to some interesting fair use judgments.
(I'm not a lawyer of course, and neither is Willingham. If I had one suggestion for Willingham it might be to talk to Creative Commons lawyers and get something like the CC0 involved, including legally binding descriptions of the parts of the series that Willingham now thinks are dedicated to the public domain.)
Others my favourites:
Alan Moore, ‘V for Vendetta’
Alan Moore, ‘League of extraordinary gentlemen’
Alan Moore, ‘Watchmen’
Neil Gaiman, ‘Sandman’(series, but packed into albums)
Frank Miller, ‘Give me liberty’
Mike Mignola, ‘Hellboy’ (series)
Masamune Shirow, ‘Ghost in the shell’
Yukito Kishiro, ‘Battle angel Alita’ (series)
Frank Miller's Ronin
You could use the Eisner Awards as a source of recommendations. Read the blurbs and preview pages of the winners and nominees, and select the book or series that appeals to you the most. For example, Ballad for Sophie was a recent highlight for me, and was nominated for four Eisner Awards.
> 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.).
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.
Not making excuses for DC, btw.
Ultimately thoug I believe the market corrects for it. We're seeing that right now with Unity. It just takes a lot of time for a bit company like this.
Institutionalised Greed is a form of Complicit Exploitation.
"I was just following orders," is one of the typical apologies.
> 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.
These are checks on greed, dishonesty, and cruelty. All that stands between healthy social order and chaos is the social trustworthiness of people.
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.
oh wait, you're still a millionaire..
Related: “It’s a miracle any of this works. People were involved.”
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.
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.
Put a limit of 10 years if the work is not available for purchase by the general public, so any work that goes out of print becomes public domain 10 years after the last copy was sold.
But... Only for works owned by _corporations_. For works still owned by the original artists, works would enter public domain on the artists death or if the artist had under-age children at the moment of their passing, when the youngest completes 18.
I think this is the best way to ensure that corpos can't sit on works for eternity while allowing artists to have an income for life, with some protection for their children in case of untimely death.
In any case, any law that implements such limitations should mandate a complete removal of any DRM involved, or at least publication of the private keys needed to decrypt any work, once they become public.
It's 100% fine if disney wants to wait a decade to make a movie about something. After that 10 years so can everybody else! There's no amount of time disney couldn't hold out for anyway. What matters is that artistic works get into the hands of the public faster, not how much money an author might lose out on in licensing deals. Copyright doesn't exist to protect possible film deals for authors. It exists to promote the creation of new works. If disney waits 10 years and makes their film then without a license fee, mission accomplished. That's a new creative work. They can then compete with every one else making new works based on that property.
See, infant mortality was shit back then which accounted for a big bias in that lifetime '37'. If you survived childhood then you did pretty well.
https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortalit...
Yes, indeed. Will it be harder for indie bands? I don't think so. Will it be different? Sure. Will it be better for the society if you could have live concerts or disco parties with great songs? Absolutely.
Also bands play each others songs without asking or paying royalty in practice where I live. I've gone and have paid a band to perform someone elses songs. It is definitely a good thing.
Playing songs live != repackaging recordings. Not even in the same ballpark. Venues of size pay licenses to ASCAP, etc. for the rights to let cover bands do this -- but it's also a usage that requires a lot more factors than just copying the song. At least in the U.S. these uses are pretty much automated vs. negotiating rights to reproduce a full album or even a single.
(Tribute bands are another animal entirely - I'm not sure how or if the various Pink Floyd tribute bands, for instance, negotiate deals with the original bands since they're not just covering the songs - they also get into likeness rights and trademark, etc.)
Live performances are a different act than recording and selling albums. Live performances are always (?) allowed, but IIRC, the songwriter/composer is due a royalty.
How often that happens in real life is a question, but live performances (currently) have a different set of rules.
It depends on how much was invested up front.
Spend a couple hours recording a joke song on your phone that happens to become a viral hit? Ten years of monopolizing it seems more than fair.
Spend millions of dollars hiring a research team and running gene sequencers for years to develop a state of the art drug? Maybe 10 years isn't enough.
They might say that, but they're just signing their own death warrant. Those who watch, like myself, will just wait out the 10 years and download it. (Well, not really, I will probably download it the next day).
It cuts both ways.
> Now - I'd be willing to talk about things like drastically shorting terms for works for hire/copyright owned by corporations and not individuals.
There is no legal distinction here, and there can't be. Even individuals will spin up an LLC which has ownership of that stuff, for tax/bankruptcy/whatever reasons. Do they lose copyright because they were business savvy?
> 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.
I'd go the other direction. 18 months, no renewals, and no criminal charges for infringement without proof of infringement for commercial sales, and most of all any works with DRM left out in the cold and can never get copyright protection (not even if they later release a version without DRM).
What does copyright length matter to people who wouldn't respect any of it?
The story is that most bands don't make anything on residuals and so have to tour to make money.
But, in any case, one can already get the work for free, people choose not to.
I have an idea on Origin Marks [1] that works here, only one source will be the lead singer, only one source will be the songwriter, buy from them _if_you_want_to_.
[1] the reverse of Trademarks, kinda, they would show not the seller per se, as Trademarks do, but the physical origins - and all historic details would attach to the mark. Change the factory, OM shows it, sell your Trademark, OM shows if it's still made in the same place or not; buying an article, OM shows which of your options are made in the same place. OM would show not just so sold it to you, not where they got it from -- cut out middlemen and optimise supply chains, that's capitalism, right?
In this case, you buy a download, who did they get the TM rights from, ego did they get the cover art rights from, who did they buy the license for the music track from? Seller would be obliged to tell you, and there sellers too ... no money going to the band, don't use that supplier, go elsewhere.
Of course there is no reason, but 10 years seems about right to me for all of them. You create something, you get revenue for it for 10 years, now that's enough, stop hogging the art, invention, standard, whatever from the society.
I think it is a fair amount of time, I don't get the arguments that they 'deserve' more.
Also please notice, that the current copyright laws are made by the society and not by God, not a law of Nature, not a Human Right or such. We made the laws to support artists and research, but I think it restricts both culture and both the quality of life too much.
Why does Wintel 'deserve' several hundreds of billions of dollars, just because they managed themselves into a rent-seeking position and we must pay them to run any software? Why there is no gold standard of microwave oven or a washing machine that everyone can produce, so a competition could push down the prices, and you could buy replacement parts for it? Why can't I pay very talented writers to write my little pony stories? I want to. Also why is it illegal to live on writing of my little pony stories? Why can't I buy a T-shirt with a custom my little pony image I like? Or why is it illegal to maintain and modify a 10 year old version of photoshop? Sure, then their own 10 year old versions would appear as a competition to Adobe, and that would hurt a lot compared to the current situation, but then it is their job to be better. Etc. How do all of this benefit the society?
Copyright laws were created originally by the society to support artists and research, but they are way too long, mostly are just used for rent-seeking, and they restrict our lives. I don't think creators 'deserve' anything, but I think a hard 10 year period is about okay to the original creators or the publishers to monetize the product, then move on to an another product, or do whatever they want.
If we're going to use terms like "deserve", then why are you deserving of someone else's work? It doesn't sound like you're even arguing that you could build upon that work, you just don't want to have to pay for it. Having some third party selling other people's art work without licensing them isn't exactly the proliferation of the arts typically argued for with lowering the copyright duration.
You're also severely downplaying just how hard it is to earn money from a creation. Bootstrapping a business is a lot of work. It can be years before you earn even a paltry sum. A good chunk of that 10 years is spent earning nothing. Maybe an established player like Disney can turn on a spigot and cash comes out, but that's not how it works for most people. I also don't see how investing in the creation of something that others find valuable is "rent-seeking". You're completely free to ignore that body of work. Nothing is restricting you from creating your own.
You see the free exchange of art without remuneration in this hypothetical future as a way to drive down costs. I see artists saying "why bother?" and an inevitable stifling of art. Most of us aren't independently wealthy or magnanimous enough to work for free.
Let's be honest, copyright is unnatural. Without copyright if I hear a story, what right has anyone else got to tell me I can't tell my version of that story as I remember it to someone else? If I hear a melody, what right does anyone have to tell me that I can't sing it?
That's literally how society and art has worked for as long as humanity has existed. Hearing and retelling. Seeing and replicating. Re-interrupting and re-envisioning.
The idea that certain ideas are forbidden, or that certain notes are owned is ridiculous. It's not normal. It's an invented legal restriction we put on ourselves. Copyright is an imposition on some very basic freedoms, we just all agree that some amount of imposition is worth it to support artists and their art. Art is so valuable to us that we censor ourselves for it.
What I'm seeing with our current copyright system is that it's hurting a lot more than it's helping. Artists are routinely getting screwed over by large corporations, while other artists are silenced entirely. Amazing creative works are prevented from being brought into the world, and have been prevented from even being preserved. We need to strike a better balance between our freedoms to share and use our own culture and supporting artists and supporting art because our current copyright system is doing a terrible job at all of it.
I'm not saying copyright is perfect. DMCA takedowns for songs playing in the background of live newsworthy events or video game play throughs aren't helping the author/creator. Legal battles over songs that coincidentally sound the same are silly to me as well.
I'm less sold on the value of remixing art. It can be done well, but often feels like a lazy attempt at capitalizing on the original creation.
We don't have to agree on any of that. The person I was replying to seemed to be making the argument that copyright terms were bad because he/she/they wanted to buy a copy of whatever on the open market where hypothetically everything is public domain. I can't comprehend the level of entitlement that leads to someone saying they should have free access to another person's work and then claims without evidence that this will spur innovation or creativity. To me, it seems clear the lack of copyright would just rapidly accelerate the decline of the humanities. Artists struggle enough. The patron model of the Renaissance is gone. The modern day minstrel can't afford rent and food. Copyright is central to how they earn a living and about the only protection they have against parasites that add nothing from taking everything.
I'm all for revisiting and revising modern copyright law. I just think tossing it all together is going to hurt society. Whatever new duration we choose should reflect the reality of just how long it can take to build a business/following/audience. Ten years seems way too short; I see artists deciding the risk:reward ratio makes it not worthwhile.
Maybe that means only the "true" artists will persist, but my experience with open source software suggests otherwise. There's some remarkable open source software out there given away freely by volunteers, but there's also a whole body of software that benefits society that only gets written because the rights holder can afford to make an investment that volunteers can't or won't. That works because there's a potential to earn something when all finished.
The world is based on the public domain (fairytale characters) but with many interesting touches, set in the modern world.
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.
"No one will consider it authentic or canon." Citation very much needed. When there's demand for something, people will take what's offered. I would be fine with some sort of easy licensing scheme that would allow others to write stories, etc., in someone else's universe / with their characters... but they should see a taste. Especially when we're talking about mid-tier or lower-tier creators who are probably depending heavily on that large body of work to keep the lights on.
That's not true. It might make it harder to make as much money, but there's nothing that says the author can't still profit from selling something after it's in the public domain. I've paid for works in the public domain multiple times, sometimes directly to the author of the work.
Creators have a massive advantage when selling their own stuff. They can include things like signed copies and extras that no one else ever could. Fans want to support the creators of the things they love because they want more of it.
I'm not saying that you should be able to claim yourself to be walt disney, but you should be able to sell a hand made mickey mouse plushie, or a mickey mouse comic (under your name). That's different.
We've already been robbed of all the amazing creative works that might have been but never were because of excessive copyright restrictions. It's hurting artists and it's hurting our culture.
We want copyright to give authors a chance to profit for a limited time, but it we need it to be much less excessive and restrictive so that new works and new artists can thrive.
I don't see why. I don't see why should they have the exclusive right to sell it anymore, and sue anyone that creates a derivative work based on their work older than 10 years.
Also Girl Genius still would have a lot of options to make money of it. I just think derivative work should be able to appear, and more than 10 years old stuff should be free as in freedom and as in free beer. And we, as a society could choose this by modifying our laws.
Of course, they're called _unions_, which prevent companies from hiring or contracting anyone who isn't part of their cabal -- I mean union.
Disney and Comcast and WB/Discovery are _competitors_ who would cut each other's throats for a nickel. Would they collude for profit? Sure, but they treat this as a zero-sum game, so they don't want to help their competition too much.
If publishers and studios refuse to ever publish anything for 10 years artists will be free to publish things for themselves and you can bet that they will. I seriously doubt there'll never be a studio or publisher smart enough to pay for a script or book and bring it to the market first though.
Once a property is out there and has a fanbase they'd be total idiots to wait until every last person on earth can churn out media involving that property because for anything remotely popular the moment the 10 years are up the market will be saturated with new versions and remixes of it. They don't want that kind of competition, especially from people outside of the industry. Copyright has been corrupted into the restrictive vice on our culture that it is today in part because of that fear.
If you are a studio or publisher it'd be far better to pay the licensing fee and rake in the massive profits within the 10 year period before everyone is tired of seeing a billion versions of something on offer everywhere and avoid having to spend the kind of money and effort it would take to differentiate your work and pull attention from everything else springing up.
I believe the "natural" state of the society where we can build on each others work, but copyrights make that practically impossible.
It lowers the quality of art significantly (I do believe that most art pieces could be significantly improved, but we can't do that).
It lowers the quality of cars, electronics, and other products, also their reparability from 100% to 0% or so, as they constantly discontinue past products, and make them shittier, and they prohibit 3rd party to make replacement parts, and we can do nothing against it.
And it allows rent-seeking behaviour, for example we gave Intel a hundred of billions of dollars or so, because the prevented other companies to produce x86 compatible chips, and they could get away with ridiculous profits. This would be illegal if Intel was a 'monopoly', but the same rent-seeking and abusing the market is not illegal since Intel is not a monopoly. Or countless other examples.
The article states that we almost developed a sane society where we could build and sell whatever we wanted, and use whatever we found (even if it was made by an other person), but the exact opposite happened. The article does not mention the reasons.
Yes. The worst part is our current effectively-infinite copyright length is a very recent invention, but it's already taken root as the-way-things-are. Imagine a world where copyright lasts 28 years max. How different would our culture be? All of our early computing history would be 100% freely available, no questions asked. Windows XP would be nearing the end of its copyright term. This is the way things were for centuries, right up until 1978 when things started going off the rails.
I could certainly imagine an alternate future that if CC got enough donations to back a big enough budget they could help pay for lawyers to full time help creators claw back IPs from major corporations with the hopes to CC or CC0 license the rights that they win back. I also imagine that would cost a lot of money and that hypothetical arm of CC would need a huge budget to win the legal fights it would want to take on.
Google for Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, Z-Library, ... ;-)
But on the other hand if that was done on a large scale it might set an expectation that old things are bought out, or even that anyone ought to be paid to release anything free at all, and that sounds very bad.
You'd be better off lobbying to weaken copyright protections. There are several charities interested in doing so, but they all have different kinds of baggage: donating to the FSF means Stallman's Way or the Highway, donating to the EFF means supporting Protect The Stack[0]. RPG[1] is run by Louis Rossmann who is fairly chill[2], but they're also the weakest in terms of anticopyright. Nobody wants to purely abolish or reform copyright; they want to do so as a means to achieve some other ends.
Putting that aside, there's also the problem that proposals to reform copyright go absolutely nowhere. Copyright maximalism is pretty uniformly supported by almost the entire US political class[3] and even very mild reforms like right-to-repair face fairly extreme bipartisan opposition. Not even the fascist-lite (DeSantis/Trump) wing of the Republican Party is willing to kick Disney in the copyright balls.
Illegally speaking, the Internet Archive is perfectly willing to publicly archive works they don't own, and they are saints for doing so. But they are also having their balls sued off.
[0] To paraphrase a lot, it means "ISPs should not have abuse desks".
[1] Repair Preservation Group
[2] He does have a right-libertarian bent and an axe to grind against New York's government, though that can be explained by them trying to kill his business
[3] Corporate leadership inclusive. Most corporations should be considered to be a kind of shadow government, not just as private entities.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Granting_work_into_t...
What part of this is not already the case for microwave ovens?
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
I lean toward making copyright non-transferable. The author keeps it for X years. They are free to license it if someone else can do better at making money from it. The problem with this seems to be group works like movies. Not sure how that would work.
An exclusive sublicensable license is effectively identical to transfer, so there's no meabingful difference between licensable and transferrable (especially the status quo “transferrable, but reclaimable after a set period of years irrespective of the nominal terms of transfer”.)
> The problem with this seems to be group works like movies.
Movies generally don't rely on cooyright transfer, they rely on legal (not merely natural) persons being original copyright holders, and works-for-hire having copyright owned by the hiring party ab initio.
He covered it.
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.
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 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!).
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?
“[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...
Can he release it? No, according to his contract (per the OP blog post) he can only publish it through DC.
Can some other entity release it? They'd need a copy of it. But are there any copies that are actually 100% his work? If you alter a public domain work, I don't think that altered work is public domain. It's not like the GPL. I'd imagine the altered work belongs to the alter-er. Surely DC had some slight nuance, a watermark, a logo, etc on whatever copies they released. Could they file a suit against somebody who scans and re-releases an old release?
Maybe a old friend has a manuscript somewhere...
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.
But surely if he doesn't have the right to give specific licenses to individuals he doesn't have the right to CC0 license it either. Based on what I understand, DC will be able to win this that he can't actually do this.
That said, could the author here have used Section 203 to revoke DC's license? I see section 203 requires that "Notices of termination may be served no earlier than 25 years after the execution of the grant or, if the grant covers the right of publication, no earlier than 30 years after the execution of the grant or 25 years after publication under the grant (whichever comes first)."
So maybe the author could have waited a few more years and done that?
Germany and Japan don't recognize public domain dedications in the law. However, this isn't a German or Japanese creator we're talking about - Bill Willingham is American. And generally speaking, the Berne Convention is just a promise to treat other countries' copyrights the same as your country would, not an obligation to provide more copyright to foreign works than domestic ones[0]. I doubt Germany is going to ultimately enforce copyright that has already evaporated in America, especially on behalf of DC, a party that doesn't actually own the copyright in question and only has an exclusive license.
What's really going to complicate this is the nature of the agreement between Bill and DC. DC could argue that an exclusive license is equivalent to copyright transfer. Copyright is corporate Calvinball, so we could see American courts trying to roll back the public domain dedication purely for the sake of submission to monied interests. I could see all sorts of stupid arguments being adopted by judges that want to see DC win and artists lose:
- Well actually, he was trying to revert rights from DC by making his work public domain, but he didn't follow the notice period requirements, so the dedication is null and void
- Well actually, the publishing agreement constitutes an effective copyright transfer, so he's just releasing DC of their obligations to him, so DC now owns Fables in perpetuity
- Well actually, Bill Willingham didn't draw the art[1], so you can't put Fables on Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, or Wikimedia Commons, all you can do is have all the male characters in your folklore be one man named 'Jack' and nothing more
As far as I'm aware, "artist burns down the copyright on their work to moot a publishing agreement" is uncharted legal territory. How any of these arguments would fare would depend on the exact text of the DC Comics publishing agreement Bill signed, which isn't public, and Bill probably can't proactively publish it. If he can, he should. Otherwise you'd only learn how much he can actually disclaim iff you get sued by DC and are able to bring the contract into the scope of discovery, which isn't exactly guaranteed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_the_shorter_term
[1] Copyright is not only viral, but also leprotic: every new instance of creativity accrues a separate copyright on that part of the work that is owned by that creator insamuch as it can be separated from the whole. This is why the GPL needs to have a copyleft clause.
Wouldn't the legal and financial burden be only on him?
He is by all account the copyright holder. He says you can do the f. you want with his work. You haven't signed any contract with DC.
You release some derived work commercially.
DC might sue him for granting rights to a third party that infringe n exclusivity clause.
But you aren't bound by any contract with DC, you aren't infringing anything if the sole copyright holder expressely gave you the permission.
The law does distinguish between a license and a public domain dedication. If Bill had instead put Fables under, say, CC-BY, that license absolutely would be invalid - you can't license rights you don't have, and the person with exclusive rights would be able to sue anyone who used the work under CC-BY[0]. But the public domain is not a licensing agreement, it's dissolving the foundation of that license agreement, and there's no precedent for what happens when there's exclusivity clauses in play.
Because there's no clear precedent[1], that means any lawsuit involving these rights would survive a motion to dismiss, meaning that the "fuck around and find out" liability falls on anyone actually trying to use Fables as a public domain work. This is to DC's favor: if they sued Bill directly, Bill would be able to point out the numerous contractual breaches DC executed, which would dissolve their agreement. But if they sue a rando, they might just settle to make the suit go away. Even if the rando was motivated to prove DC wrong, they don't have standing to legislate contractual breaches DC made to third parties, so DC would be able to legally assert rights they might not even have.
[0] While Creative Commons wasn't involved, the situation would otherwise be identical to the Harmony Gold/Mechwarrior lawsuit. BattleTech, a tabletop giant robot miniature game, licensed some mech designs from various Japanese cartoons. Those same cartoons were also licensed by Harmony Gold and Frankensteined together into a single cartoon called Robotech. BattleTech licensed out their miniature game to Activision to make a PC game called Mechwarrior. Harmony Gold sued because mechs from their cartoon were in their PC game, and the ultimate result was that because of the exclusivity clauses in play, BattleTech's license to Activision for those specific mech designs was null and void, so Activision was infringing Harmony Gold's rights.
Yes, this is one of those legendary lawsuits that you hear about from MechWarrior fans in the same way that rhythm game fans will never forget what Konami did to In The Groove.
[1] I fully expect an actual lawyer to reply with clear precedent in DC's favor. The best search engine is to reply with the wrong answer on Hacker News.
It's clear he's transfered some rights to DC via an exclusive license. He may be the sole copyright owner, but he isn't the sole person with an ownership interest in Fables, and it's not clear that a third party with an ownership interest (DC comics) can't sue you.
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 is an awesome artist. I love his style.
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.
Since Hitler's general staff believed Sealion wouldn't work it was never attempted and so although "You can always take one with you" was considered it was never actually used.
There were guerrilla units established who had more targeted training (ie. To assassinate collaborators in any puppet government) but that wasn't necessarily a suicide mission and it wasn't general, the "you can always take one with you" messaging would have addressed the general population.
He hasn't destroyed Fable, but he's drastically reduced its value to DC.
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)?
It actually sounds like the standard contract DC use with "author-owned" material at least since Watchmen (and possibly before): creators maintain ownership of the IP, but publication/distribution rights of certain amounts of material are granted exclusively to DC - as long as such material is made available for sale.
This is famously how they locked away Watchmen: they kept reprinting the original run in paperbacks every year, so that the publication clause would never expire and Moore/Gibbons would never be able to take it elsewhere (and never be able to claim full royalties rather than a determined, reduced rate). I think there were lawsuits at some point, but the outcome was just a little more money for authors.
Willingham seems to have decided to take the nuclear option instead, by releasing the IP in the public domain. This means the already-published material will remain the preserve of DC, but anyone is supposedly free to write and publish new stories with the same characters. As others stated, it's unlikely to happen on a large scale, because of the chilling effect of potentially having to go against DC/Warner in court; but it should ensure fanfic and other creative expressions can flourish.
He owns the copyright for Fables. He has released the copyright for Fables into the public domain. He does not have the right to release the official comic series into the public domain because DC Comics has partial ownership of that. His contract with DC Comics is still in effect and has not been broken. He is not creating new Fables comics but is not preventing the official series from being sold.
If people treat the DC version as "official", then that has some (not all) of the same effects as claiming that Willingham gave DC the copyrights in the first place. DC can't sue anyone if they aren't the owner, but they can take advantage of fandom's desire for an "official" version to crowd out anyone else writing such a comic, and threaten competitors with lawsuits to get them to stay away (IANAL and don't know exactly how much they could do).
However, my questions still remain just as strong.
Your reaction is why you are not a DC executive. Shareholders, your board would not stand for your concern for employee/contractor over profit.
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.
Everyone else can now write stories using the characters without worry. Anyone depicting the characters visually will want to make sure that they don't strongly resemble the art that DC presumably still has a copyright on.
I suspect if he got sued that he'd be able to get good legal help either from organizations like the EFF, or with crowdfunding. I'd certainly donate to that.
As I see it this move helps DC since they can now do whatever they want with Fables (make a movie, change characters, etc, etc.) without the author having any say as they also now own it 100% as the author says. At the same time they have enough lawyers to keep everyone else at bay for long enough that it won't matter.
But what about if I make up a novel and sell it starring the character Peter Parker beat in the match ring in the early aughts film? I say this character is the same character, make up a story of how he recovered from his injury, opened a hot dog launching factory as a novelty theme park, then died of cancer.
The story is set in Earth 616 ostensibly, but I don't use Spider-man beyond that being the past of this main character.
Is that a derivative work? Can you copyright a name/character traits without using trademark law to focus on customer confusion?
EDIT: I think this is laudable what he did, I'm just curious if he even needed to do so in the first place, or if the law already allowed you to do this, in the same way that the Open Gaming License of DND 5E only gave you rights to use the rules system of 5E that copyright law already allowed you to do in the first place?
The original book has entered the public domain and can be reproduced, in whole or in part, by anyone. This includes the characters.
The Disney created works (books, animated, etc.) are still under copyright.
The original Pooh did not wear clothes; the Disney Pooh wears a red shirt. I could write a story based on the original Milne book and it would be legal; if I put Pooh in a red shirt, I would be violating Disney's copyright.
Many of the character names are trademarked by Disney; however, it is not a violation to use those names for new works that are not based on Disney works.
Actually, Pooh wears just such a top in chapter three, perhaps because it’s cold, and although all I can actually check at present is https://www.gutenberg.org/files/67098/67098-h/67098-h.htm#CH... which clearly shows it in the original black and white line art, I believe that it was red in colourised versions (though I’m not actually certain when colourisation happened or what its status is).
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.
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.
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.
> In shorter words, Miss Rosa Parks's decision to stay in a forward seat was the first move in a planned boycott of the bus company and the city law, a campaign organised long before by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and run by a young, bland, handsome black parson, name of Martin Luther King Jr, who while I was in Montgomery, flew in from Atlanta twice a week to buy little vans for use by the boycotters.
TIL the guidelines also say:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Also, DC does have rights to past output, the "new" public domain rights are for the general public to create stories in the universe using the unique creative elements that Willingham formerly retained copyright for, as per his contract.
Willingham and DC are still bound by the contract between them. But, the rest of the world is not. That doesn't mean that DC won't still try to strong-arm anyone who wishes to make their own Fables stories, it just means that Willingham has given the copyrights that he retained as per contract to the general public.
IANAL, this is layman analysis, etc.
If Willingham indeed retains the rights to "storylines, characters, and elements therein", then these clowns are knowingly lying.
You quoted "first" correctly: this is not. The concept of placing something in the public domain, is well established. So are its implications.
If a 3rd party goes out to make a movie or something, what's DC Comics going to do? Assert IP rights they don't own, and never have? Prevent someone from using IP that's in the public domain? Sue for breaching a contract that 3rd party doesn't have with them? Good luck with that, and... Streisand.
For a creator this is kind of a nuclear option. But warranted in this case. Well played, mr. Willingham!
Jeff Ryan wrote: I'd love it if in the future this move was commonplace, and known as "The Willingham."
+1.
Willingham also mentions he's 67 years old. Maybe he just doesn't care anymore what will happen to him or his creations.
Interesting though. This is the second time in a few days i read that DC Comics is royally f-ing creators over their rights and property.
If you plan to never travel to the US.
What cannot be controlled however, is the reach of the USA over other countries, extraditions treaties, corruption, exfiltrations, sequestrations and murders.
Does everything thas has been created outside of the US suddenly become US creations under US law whenever its creator sets foot on American soil?
Also, a lot of copyright law around the world is very close to American copyright law, so what happens outside of the US is anyone's guess. For example, AFAIK, a lot of Soviet cartoons are in a copyright limbo of Russia because they infringe on Disney's (and others') IP [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect
[2] Fo example, Winnie the Pooh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQmGXzNMw0E
Willingham explains his actions a bit more in this post:
https://billwillingham.substack.com/p/more-about-fables-in-t...
Easier said than done but if some artists can manage it, the theory is that DC can't sue thousands and thousands of people.
That's what would really make this effective in some way regardless of legal outcomes. For the culture in general to de facto start ignoring DC's claims.
Is it really possible that modern culture will all just be owned in one or three portfolios.
Edit: his follow-up post says he signed away publishing and adaptation rights to DC... isn't that.... all of the rights?
There's also the issue of trademarks which might also prevent people from using the Fables name.
I don't see a way around this:
> The one thing in our contract the DC lawyers can’t contest, or reinterpret to their own benefit, is that I am the sole owner of the intellectual property. I can sell it or give it away to whomever I want.
If he kept full ownership, and I obviously can't see any of his contracts, DC doesn't have any ownership and so can't stop any such publication. It's like how publishing a nice edition of Shakespeare doesn't give that publisher any proprietary rights to Hamlet.
That's not going to be a long court case regardless of how many lawyers they throw at it, since they would have been unable to produce anything showing that they owned the IP that you are allegedly infringing - because they simply didn't own the IP.
This was true before Willingham pulled this stunt. They never owned it, he did. The only one who could have sued would have been Willingham himself.
With this recent event technically everyone owns it (they too), but bringing that up won't help them at all.
Trademarks: I don't think they should have any, given that you can't trademark something you don't own. Searching trademark databases didn't yield anything.
"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."
https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/55100/dc-responds-bill-w...
Succinct but accurate summary of the current state of the law.
"Without draconian legal fictions to the tune of intellectual property, all artists would cease creating entirely out of sheer greed."
Strange world we live in that the client part of the contract can be more enforced than the company part of the contract, just because everybody is scared to be sued to literal death.
I’ve always said that I find it wrong that someone who dedicated their life to finding a cure for a life threatening desease is told: “You get 20 years to turn a profit, then it’s a free for all” yet if someone draws a cute mouse we say: “You get your lifetime, plus 75 years of exclusivity then it’s a gray zone case of which derivatives you own and what you can sue for” (looking at Winnie the Pooh’s red shirt).
You’d think that drawings and written content would be ranked lower than literally curing life threatening deseases and saving lives, when it comes to how long we give the inventors and creators to monetize their creations.
Do you honestly believe that someone who spends their life looking for a cure, does it in the hopes of making lots of cash when they're 60?
If you're that kind of person, there's other professions out there that will let you make bank before you're too old to enjoy it.
It isn't just the creators of the intellectual property, it's the investors.
> If you're that kind of person, there's other professions out there that will let you make bank before you're too old to enjoy it.
From what I hear, that applies even more strongly to the arts than to the STEMs.
... does anyone have Alan Moore's phone number?
'In 2022 he confirmed it, saying "I'm definitely done with comics, I haven't written one for getting on for five years.'
Not sure why he'd be interested.
I doubt it, but I wouldn't blame somebody for trying.
Actually, all this is ignoring the fact that AFAIK, you can't just revoke copyright and put something into the public domain, you have to explicitly grant a non-exclusive licence to everyone instead. That's why all the CC style licences exist.
Also, characters from fable came from the public domain, so it's a logical conclusion from the point of view of the author.
It doesn't hurt DC financially, other than potentially diluting the Fable brand because anyone else can also use it now. There's also a strong likelihood that DC do in fact own partial copyright over anything that isn't the comic - so any figurines, film spinoffs, etc., in fact anything that wasn't wholly created entirely by Willingham, even if he still owns the underlying IP, so people almost certainly aren't free to make copies of anything other than just the comics.
Also I don't understand why my comment (the GP to this comment) was been moderated down so much. Is it just that my opinion is unpopular with fans and so it was downvoted rather than debated? For instance, re my comment about public domain vs explicit license there are many articles like this: https://www.techdirt.com/2015/01/23/why-we-still-cant-really...
However, that in and of itself isn't depriving DC of anything, as they're no worse off financially than if whatever you make never existed. Arguably, if you create something that's a runaway financial success, and someone has to choose between buying your thing and the DC produced thing, then sure maybe then DC loses a sale. But sales are rarely binary like that. If you do something that promotes the brand, it probably benefits DC's sales as well.
The only thing that might actually impact on their profit is someone producing an exact copy of the original comics, at a lower price, and of better quality. Even then, people might still buy the DC version so it matches the rest of their collection. And if it is an exact, exact copy of the original comic, there's always a risk there might be something with a DC copyright on it, e.g. the font that's used in the title, maybe a reference to some other DC property, etc...